PinoyEcoFarmer

Manage Insects on Your Farm: A Guide to Ecological Strategies. Ecological pest management employs tactics that have existed in natural ecosystems for thousands of years. Since the beginning of agriculture — indeed, long before then — plants co-evolved with pests and with the natural enemies of those pests. As plants developed inherent protective mechanisms against pests, they were helped by numerous partners in the ecosystem, for example:

Beneficial insects that attack crop insects and mites by chewing them up or sucking out their juices; Beneficial parasites, which commandeer pests for habitat or food; Disease-causing organisms, including fungi, bacteria, viruses, protozoa and nematodes that fatally sicken insects or keep them from feeding or reproducing. These organisms also attack weeds; Insects such as ground beetles that eat weed seeds Beneficial fungi and bacteria that inhabit root surfaces, blocking attack by disease organisms.

A crimson clover cover crop prevents erosion, improves soil, fixes nitrogen and attracts beneficial insects. By integrating these natural strategies into your farming systems, you can manage pests in a way that is healthier for the environment and eliminates many of the problems associated with agrichemical use. Knowing the life cycles of pests and understanding their natural enemies allows you to better manipulate the system to enhance, rather than detract from, the built-in defenses available in nature.

Another National Academy of Science report (1996), Ecologically Based Pest Management (EBPM), stated that EBPM “should be based on a broad knowledge of the agro-ecosystem and will seek to manage rather than eliminate pests” in ways that are “profitable, safe, and durable.” In addition to reducing pest damage, shifting your farming system to ecological pest management will bring multiple benefits to your operation. For example, moving from monoculture to longer rotations improves water-and nutrient-use efficiency. Cover crops planted to attract beneficial insects also suppress weeds, improve the soil, provide moisture-conserving mulch, fix or store nitrogen for subsequent crops and contribute to overall nutrient management goals.

Crop Rotation on Organic Farms : A Planning Manual. Crop rotation is a critical feature of all organic cropping systems because it provides the principal mechanism for building healthy soils, a major way to control pests, and a variety of other benefits. Crop rotation means changing the type of crop grown on a particular piece of land from year to year. As used in this manual, the term includes both cyclical rotations, in which the same sequence of crops is repeated indefinitely on a field, and noncyclical rotations, in which the sequence of crops varies irregularly to meet the evolving business and management goals of the farmer. Each field has its own rotation, and, consequently, each farmer manages a set of rotations.

Good crop rotation requires long-term strategic planning. However, planning does not necessarily involve identifying which crop will be grown on a field years in advance. Indeed, such specificity may prove futile as plans become disrupted by weather, changes in the market, labor supply, and other factors. Lack of planning, however, can lead to serious problems—for example, the buildup of a soilborne disease of a critical crop, or imbalances in soil nutrients. Such problems can result in an inability to meet the demands of a carefully cultivated market or in additional labor and expense. Problems caused by faulty rotation often take several years to develop and can catch even experienced growers by surprise. In fact, rotation problems usually do not develop until well after the transition to organic cropping. Since the crops grown by organic farmers are often different and more diverse than those grown in the preceding conventional system, the organic transition itself often rotates away from the previous crops and their associated problems. Most farmers are greatly tempted to plant excessive acreage of the most profitable crop or to overuse certain fields for one type of crop. Such practices can lead to costly problems that take many years to correct. The purpose of this book is to help growers and farm advisors understand the management of crop rotations; avoid crop rotation problems; and use crop rotation to build better soil, control pests, and develop profitable farms that support satisfied families.

Building a Sustainable Business: A Guide to Developing a Business Plan for Farms and Rural Businesses. Regardless of whether you are a beginning entrepreneur who has recently inherited a business, an experienced farmer who is considering on-farm processing, or a retiring business owner who is looking to pass on the farm, business planning is important. It is an ongoing process that begins with the identification of values and ends with a strategic plan to address critical management functions.

Like many rural entrepreneurs, you may have a strong sense of the values that drew you to the land or inspired you to begin a business. You may also have a clear set of personal and business goals that you would like to pursue “when the time is right.” But, if you’re like most farmers and rural business owners, you run into problems when trying to incorporate values and goals into day-to-day business decisions. How can you build a balanced and sustainable business—one that reflects your values and is successful—in the long run?

Unlike most other business planning tools, Building a Sustainable Business: A Planning Guide for Farmers and Rural Business Owners takes a whole-farm approach. You will consider traditional business planning and marketing principles as well as your personal, economic, environmental and community values—those less tangible things that are a part of your thoughts every day, but which often don’t become a planned part of your business. You will be asked to integrate values with business management practices throughout this Guide.

Building Soils for Better Crops: Sustainable Soil Management. This book is meant to give the reader a holistic appreciation of the importance of soil health and to suggest ecologically sound practices that help to develop and maintain healthy soils.

Building Soils for Better Crops has evolved over time. The first edition focused exclusively on the management of soil organic matter. If you follow practices that build and maintain good levels of soil organic matter, you will find it easier to grow healthy and high-yielding crops. Plants can withstand droughty conditions better and won’t be as bothered by insects and diseases. By maintaining adequate levels of organic matter in soil, you have less reason to use as much commercial fertilizer, lime, and pesticides as many farmers now purchase. Soil organic matter is that important.

Organic matter management was also the heart of the second edition, the authors decided to write a more comprehensive guide that includes other essential aspects of building healthy soils, such as managing soil physical properties and nutrients, as well as a chapter on evaluating soil health. In addition, the farmer case studies were updated and added a new one. The case studies describe a number of key practices that enhance the health of the farmers’ soils.

Throughout the tropics people grow fruit and vegetables in their own vegetable gardens. Why do they keep a garden?

• It assures them good food at low cost. Fruit and vegetables are necessary for the good health of children and adults. They make their diet more balanced and tastier. By keeping a garden people are less dependent on shops and markets, where supplies are often irregular and prices are high. You Want More? Continue Reading……..

Poultry is an important farm species in almost all countries. It is an important source of animal protein, and can be raised in situations with limited feed and housing resources. Chickens are ‘waste converters’: they ‘convert’ a scavenged feed resource base into animal protein. They are therefore by far the most important species for generating income for rural families.

People raise chickens all around the world under widely varying circumstances. Their main objective is generally the same: maximum production for minimum costs and with minimum risks. The two main forms of keeping small-scale chicken are small-scale subsistence farming and commercial farming. If poultry is mainly kept for home consumption of eggs and meat, costs and effort can be kept to a minimum. But for a poultry enterprise to be successful, it must have a reliable market for its products and a steady supply of reasonably priced quality feed. It is important that feed resources are locally available.

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Trees are vitally important to people. They provide many products, including food for humans and animals, timber, fuel and medicines. In the tropical zone trees are much more important as food crops and cash crops than in temperate zones, where palms and large herbaceous  perennials such as banana are absent because of the cold winters.

Trees not only provide products, they also protect the environment and improve the living conditions around a farm. For example, they provide shade and shelter and play a vital role in preventing soil erosion and in sustaining soil fertility. All over the world forests as well as scattered trees are being cut down by people in their search for timber, fuelwood or land for other uses. Uncontrolled fires also destroy many trees.

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Abstract

John Maurice died in July 2002 after 50 years of tree nursery work in Israel. He had a way with plants and it seemed as though no woody species could resist being cloned by him. John had an uncanny feeling for creating a congenial nursery environment under harsh conditions and pioneered the propagation of ‘mini-trees’, including cultivars of a wide range of fruit and nut crops and selected progenies of species used in agroforestry.

Neither poor infrastructure, nor heat or drought would prohibit the movement of mini-trees to remote districts. If necessary the mini-trees could be raised to a conventional size for field planting in a simple nursery within the district. And to make advances in tree crop breeding anywhere in the world available to developing countries, John envisaged an international network for the exchange of mini-trees. John did not live to see these dreams come true, although he demonstrated that his vision was no daydream closer to home: he was asked to establish a nursery in the harsh environment of the Negev desert.

This paper is written as a tribute to John Maurice, in the conviction that his propagation methods deserve wider application, particularly in the Third World. The methods are discussed in some detail and scrutinized according to the tenets of crop science. They are also placed in the context of developments in plant propagation in general. John’s notions about the role of high quality nursery stock in engendering development in the Third World are presented. The operation of national plant quarantine stations and the Asian citrus rehabilitation programme are examples of activities that might benefit greatly from employing mini-trees.

Nurseryman and His Trees by Ed Verheij and Harrie Lövenstein

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