Organic Agriculture

Some progress was made this week, despite an unsuccessful trip to Cusco on Wednesday. Daniel and I traveled to Cusco Wednesday morning to visit the Agriculture department at the University of Cusco and to meet a contact given to us by the director of the Agricultural office in Urubamba. The contact is the owner of a store devoted to organic agricultural products.

He was traveling for the week but we were given his business card and contact information. We then went to the University of Cusco to see whom we could find from the Agriculture department. To our dismay, we discovered that the Agriculture Faculty resides on the other side of Cusco, about 40 minutes away from the main campus. After waiting about 30 minutes for a bus to take us there, we decided to go another day because we wouldn’t arrive at the other campus until 1pm, just as the leisurely Peruvian lunch hour begins. We saw the Cusco counterpart to the Agricultural office of Urubamba and went in to see if we could find anyone but everyone was on lunch.

Wednesday night we finally got in touch with Zenobio, the president of Media Luna, and set up a meeting for the following morning. Thursday morning we met Zenobio at his chacra, located outside of Media Luna. The first order of business was discussing the date for the next assembly. Since we’ve completed the survey, I’ve compiled the results of the survey into a presentation needs to be shown to the community members of Media Luna. Also since the completion of the survey, the assembly date has continued to be postponed. Due to a number of holidays and days set to work on community projects the assembly is now supposed to take place the first weekend in November, however it is unclear whether it will be Sunday November 1^st or the following weekend. Regardless, we haven’t been able to do much without the occurrence of the assembly.

On a positive note, he showed us the mix of compost and manure that he uses as an organic form of fertilizer. When using organic fertilizer, the process of preparing the land for planting is much more time consuming and effort intensive. Instead of spending a week preparing the soil with fertilizer, Zenobio told us that he treated the soil with the organic fertilizer for six months before planting. He also told us that he planted 3 days after his aunt, who used chemical fertilizers, and his corn crops are taller and healthier than hers. We also discovered that there is a piece of communal land in the community (about 4,000 square meters) that can be used as part of a “transitioning to organic” pilot project.