The past week and a half has been spent attempting to establish contact with agricultural professionals in the Cusco region. Email does not work in the same way as it does in the U.S. When I first started to look for contacts I searched the webpage of the University of Cusco's Agriculture Department for email addresses or other contact information to get in touch with some of the professors. Only two out of fifteen professors had email addresses listed, neither of them responded to my email. Also the general email address for the department is not functioning. While I was surprised by the lack of access to the professors (I'm accustomed to being able to find any professor's email address, mailing address, phone number, etc. on their university websites), Daniel, a native Peruvian, was not surprised in the least. He was actually more intrigued by my plan to look up the email addresses of the professors. His plan was to just go to the University of Cusco and wander around until we found someone.
Since last week the plan has become somewhat more fine-tuned. Just walking around Urubamba I noticed a building marked as an office of Agrorural, part of the Peruvian Ministry of Agriculture. Daniel and I went to present Nexos, our project and ourselves in Media Luna hoping that they would have some information to offer us. We explained that we've found agriculture to be the most pressing issue in Media Luna, with the high cost of fertilizer reducing the productivity of the community member's fields. Not surprisingly, we were informed that they don't work in that area but there are two other Ministry of Agriculture offices we could visit, one in Urubamba just farther down the road and the other in Calca, a town about 30 minutes away.
Today we finally were able to sit down with the director of the Agricultural office in Urubamba and were able to speak to him about the project and what steps would be necessary to take from here. The director was very informative, expressing how the soil of the entire valley has become deteriorated from the use of chemical fertilizers, one in particular doing the most damage, UREA. Each year more chemical fertilizer is necessary to replace the natural nutrients that the fertilizer strips from the soil.
It takes five years to convert the soil back to its organic nature. During these five years the soil must be treated with guano (manure) and small amounts of chemical fertilizer can be used to maintain the soil's productivity. Switching directly to a purely organic fertilizer would result in nearly no crop yield, doing much harm to the livelihood of the farmers. Although it is accepted that organic crops are better quality than the alternative, there is little incentive to produce organic crops. There is not a market for organic products in Urubamba and even if there were there's no agency responsible for verifying that a product is organic.
Another problem plaguing the effectiveness of fertilizer is the method used to irrigate the fields. The fields are irrigated basically by gravity, the flowing of the water strips away the nutrients, chemical or natural. The director explained that another form of irrigation, such as micro pressure, would reduce the amount of nutrients removed from the soil during irrigation. This process would have a high initial cost, i.e. installation, but overtime it would provide more water to the field as well as produce crops in a greater quantity and of better quality.
However, the Agricultural office we visited is primarily administrative in its duties and does not provide technical support. The director told us that it is necessary to have a soil conservation professional conduct an analysis of the soil; this could be a professor or possibly students of agriculture. Following the analysis, a parcel of the community's land must be secured for agricultural demonstrations. Although we still have not secured support for the project we have been introduced to important information regarding the nature of the Sacred Valley's soils and possible agricultural contacts in Cusco.
