The Terra Preta Project, Step 1 and 2

How to convert a dry/waterlogged, poor soil landscape into a lush rich garden!

Here we are starting a whole new project on converting poor soil, with hard tufts of grasses into useable agricultural soil. The soil is highly weathered clay, with non existing top soil, which becomes waterlooged and sticky during torrential rains, and dry packed hard soil during the dry season. The area is extremely dry with intermittent rainfall in the rainy season. This picture was taken at the end of the dry season.

The name Terra Preta is derived from the soil fenomenon found in the Amazon basin. These earths appear to be anthropogenic and have been studied in recent years, to find out why this soil, apparently created by ancient indian is so fertile and black even centuries later. We will be using some of those techniques in this system later on.

STEP 1.
Create an interconnected swale/water hole system.

Swales are constructed perpendicular to hills. These swales collect rainwater and carry it along at a 2% grade across the land. At each junction a water hole is constructed, from which another swale carries the overload across the land in the opposite directtion. Water holes can also be constructed in between junctions to allow collection of excess rain water.

Then end result is a zig-zag system of water channels which not only prevent erosion, but deposit the water in numerous water holes along the way before draining away into a nearby stream. The water is therfore maintained in these holes which allow moisture to seep into the surrounding soil between rainfall, or can be used for irrigation when necessary. This swale system will also be used for drainage later on.

STEP 2.
Put piggies to work! Pigs in piggy tractors, are put in place to excavate the soil little by little. If it is desired to do the work faste, one can use more pigs, in more tractors. The pigs are showered daily and the soil moistened, upon which they begin their work. The grasses are uprooted, and the end result is loose brown soil complete with pig manure!

Companion planting corn and beans

Here is a good example of companion planting.
corn thrives being planted with beans, in this case green beans. You actually put the corn and the beans seed in the same hole, and voilá!

The corn provides a trellis to the bean, and the bean fixes nitrogen for the corn as well as maintains humidity. One of our first crops while improving the soil after planting only beans, was corn with beans.

Our New Bunny House

Well, weve just constructed our first large scale bunny house. None of those independent cages that your used to seeing. I first saw the design in another blog that showed a picture of bunnies, in a bunny house in Morocco.


The bunnies used to be in bunny tractors, but that quickly became a problem because, first the females like to burrow in the ground for their nests, and if the tractor keeps moving they cannot establish their den. The other reason is also that burrowing in the ground of a movable cage is not ideal, as the bunnies carve holes large enough to escape or be endangered by dogs or other animals.
The other problem I noticed is that the rabbits become very wild in that environment and not very socialized, nor do they receive enough space for running around.

This new house has cubicles all around the house while the interior stays open to socialization. We made a 10' x 12' wooden frame, wraped in chicken wire from the inside. We burried the wire about 2 feet deep cemented into the ground. An 18 inch tall frame of sticks was built around the emerging wire. Onto this frame and wire support we proceeded to add "barro" or earth/clay with grass to make an 18 inch tall wall all around. We didn´t use cement because That would have heated up too much with the sun and would have caused the cubicles to be really hot. At the same time we were making blocks of earth stabilized with grass. The dimensions of these are 18"x18"x4". The cubicles were covered with 10' long boards.
The roof is a really nice clay imitation roof that we painted brick red.

Once the blocks were all dry we placed them in their locations to make 15 cubicles. We then smoothed and filled in the walls and cubicles with a water clay earth mixture. We then proceeded to fill the entire house with enough dirt to raise the floor about 3" to 4". The cubicles were then secure not to tople over. A bedding can be added on top like rice husks which we made an order for but still have not received. In the social area of the middle is where the water, fresh food and pellets and hay are put.

The house can be raked easily to clean, and the cubicles have access through the roof or by removing the clay blocks.

Once we added the bunnies, they were extatic! The moms with their young babies quickly picked their den. The babies started to explore all the cubicles with eagerness, hopping and skipping and running around with glee. Once we added the young immature females, they started jumping all over, including on top of the boards, looking at their million dollar view. All in all success!

The breeding males are kept separate, and the young males are separated once they start producing their scrotum and just when their testes descend, to the bunny tractor until they are large enough to slaughter, along with the older or unreliable females. We place the mature females one by one into the breeding males cage, for one day, and one night, then add them to the house.

We haven't had any moms give birth there yet, so I will coment on that when it happens. But as far as I now, they will burrow into their den, and slowly the babies will emerge as they grow.

The story of our raised circular beds

Here are pictures of our constructed raised beds. The last picture is of when we just started constructing them, the first two are of the finished beds. They are circular raised beds. We designed them that way for more delicate crops where we can adjust the soil according to the needs of our plant and to enhance drainage. Sandy our ridgeback is standing on the terraces that we started this year. And you can also see our rustic "semillero" construction where we plant our seedlings and extremely delicate crops like lettuce.

The soil in this area is a heavy clay, which gets very sticky in the rain. There wasn´t much growing on it except some tuffs of grass and weeds as you can see. I picked this area to start my garden, because I felt like it had moisture from infiltration of a nearby creek and because it is on the edge of the forest. I´m a big believer in planting on forest edges. I find that the ecology there is more vibrant and productive. This is why I believe that including trees in agriculture is so important.

The first year (2006) I planted beans everywhere. I cut the beans just before maturing seeds and left them on the ground as green manure since I had no other kind at that point.

The following year (2007)I did the same, although I harvested a few dry beans for personal consumption and for replanting of them. That year we also planted the beans in the paddock areas, where they grew very poorly. The beige beans (frijol chiricano blanco) grew far worse than the red ones (frijol chiricano rojo). The plants of the beige beans remained small and yellowish, however produced aboundant seed. The plants were cut and left on the ground again. That same year we also planted improved pasture in our pasture area. It gre quite well but not very dense in some areas.

I repeated this same process in 2008. We also planted a few yucca plants around the area.

By 2009 we decided to create the circular raised beds. We excavated the earth with an excavator and hand shaped them into cirular raised beds in an attempt to reduce erosion, reduce water-logging and improve drainage. I realize this is not the most economical way to prepare the earth but I wanted to prepare some controled environments for my experiments.

We prepared the soil with bags of charcoal which we obtained from our neighbours who make pottery, as well as chicken manure. We used about 5 sacks of each in each 5m raised bed. Rocks were placed around the beds to secure them. I didn't originaly plan on them being so tall but that is what the workers did when I wasn't supervising but taking care of my then newborn baby and two year old.

Last rainy season I discovered though that drainage was still a problem so I have to find a way to find a solution. One way would be to mix sand or sandy soil into our mounds. I had originaly considered that but the cost is quite high.

When we first excavated I kept an eye on what native bug spieces we would find. I didn't see much except for ants and termites. This year however when we introduced irrigation tubing into our beds, we had excavate a small amount of each bed abd found for the first time nothing else but earthworms!!

I was very excited. I keep working hard to enhance the soil organic matter. I try to keep as much leaf litter as I can on the beds to decompose. As the soil organic matter increases it becomes very obvious that the soil quality increases. The soil has changed colour drasticaly from a red to brown. The texture is more loose and a little less sticky than it was originaly. It gets less packed when dry and less boggy when wet. I now that the charcoal was a necesity. We didn´t put charcoal into one of the beds, and although it had chicken manure the plants on it showed signs of iron deficiency and/or toxicity, and the earth remained red. It was quite a drastic difference actualy.

Our new semillero

The dry season is bringing with it a lot of wind. The wind is so bad it is eroding our mounds and even blowing away our seeds. So I decided to make a new lettuce bed in our wind protected "semillero".

On the vital importance of soil health!

Traditional farming relies on stripping the earth bare to pant the seeds that will be harvested in a few months time. In the temperate regions these bare fields are left as such to overwinter. This may be its saving grace since it allows the earth to rest until the next growing season and regenerates to some extend the soil biota.

In the tropics however there is a whole different story. Farmers try to emulate the farming in temperate regions with often devastating consequences.

The advantage of farming in the tropics is that one could potentialy use the land all year round. The disadvantage is that the soil horizon is highly unstable due to torrential rains in the rainy season, high heat and sun and drought in the dry season. Soils get eroded quickly and the most of the fertile portions of the soil gets washed away into rivers when left exposed.

Regardless of the climate however, I fear that conventional farming has completely ignored the biological factor of soils, as being vitaly important in not only the health of the soil but consequently the health of the people connected to the soil. As the Biochemist Rene Voisin has stated last century already, Human health and illness is directly dependant on soil health. Nowadays farmers are primary concerned with 3 nutrients NPK. Nitrogen, phosphorus and Potassium. How naive we must be to believe that an organism as complicated as a plant has needs so simplistic that we can round it up into three letters!
Of course some other micronutrients are occasionaly considered by farmers, however often when fertilizers are concerned NPK becomes the norm.

When is soil organic matter ever considered? How igonrant we are that we simplify nature som nuch so that we may consider oursleves master tamers of "the beast".

Nature is vastly more complicated than we give it credit for. And soil organic matter must be nurtured constantly since it is the "breastmilk" of our plants. Soil Biota are which allow soil organic matter to thrive. A complex cocktail of bacteria, fungi, yeasts, molds, worms, ants, and so many other insects are involved in nutrient cycling in the earth. This small biosphere must bu protected and nurtured at all cost. Now if we put a caustic chemical sucha as urea (a nitrogen source) onto the soil, would it not damage the sensitive balance of organisms that exist? Now imagine pesticides, herbicides, the entire agro- farmaceutical arsenal at the disposal of the farmer. We are poisoning our own nutrient sink of which all our well being depends. Because that is exactly what our soils are to us. Everyting we need to live, to thrive to function, is contained in the nutrient sink of our soils. Plants are the builders of the molecules that we need. But the building blocks come from nowhere else but... soil.

Tropical Agriculture

We have been totally disconnected from where we come from and who we are on this planet. It is so sad to see that most of today's children believe that food comes from a carton in the supermarket rather than nature. It has gotten to the point where people consider nature as an entity to fear and conquer rather than the source of our being and well being.

Here in Panama I see so many people leaving their land, selling it for any possible money to pay their drinking debt or merely have $$$ mostly unaware of their property´s actual worth. This phenomenon was one of the reasons why the Panamanian real estate market shot up so tremendously. Poor farmers where selling their land for peanuts to eager expats taking advantage of the opportunity to relieve their home tax burdens. So these farmers then hurry to set up in the city where they struggle, work in ill paying jobs and perhaps even end up stealing to get buy. People especially young people do not see the importance of their land. They don't realize that everything they need can be found there.


The other day my husband found two enormous books that answered all our prayers regarding organic land use, they were manuals on organic agriculture written pure and simple on all possible topics. One was a manual on animal husbandry and related topics, while the other was on agriculture. Both written in Spanish and for all climatic regions. These are the most extensive books that I have seen on the subject. However, together they cost close to $300. What concerned us is that the people that most benefit from this knowledge, the poor landowners, do not have access to this type of information.

We have a farm where we cultivate organic produce for our own consumption and the excess we sell as organic baskets to a small clientele. Around our land are numerous poor people who don´t even have latrines or showers. They bathe in a small creek that goes dry in the dry season. This is also the same creek that they use as a toilet, as do numerous people up the creek as well as down the creek. These people make pottery for a living so that they may walk about 5km to the nearest store to buy food which in most cases are cans, dry beans and UHT milk. These people don't cultivate their land except for the occasional yucca and plantain plants. Some also have scrawny little chickens running around. Most however have been fooled to believe that they land is worthless for farming or that it costs a lot of money in fertilizer and pesticides to make anything grow.

One of our neighbours does grow some crops, however he first uses herbicides to kill anything on the soil prior to planting and then sprayes pesticides to kill anything after planting. I'm sure that this is no different from a farmer in a developed country. The difference is though that, one; tropical soil cannot handle this kind of treatment before quickly degrading into something useless, and second; this farmer needs to be relatively well off the be able to pay for all these products.

Tropical soils need to be handled with care, and ironically the easiest and cheapest management of tropical soils is the healthiest and most productive. Soil organic matter is of prime importance, it is necessary to maintain it above all costs. How to do so? Mulch, compost, don't till! Always maintain soil covered, leave dead plants there! Always fertilize with mature compost of plant as well as animal origin. Don´t over till the soil once biological organisms have made their homes in the soil due to the enrichment of soil organic matter, leave them there! Protect them at all cost!

When we bought our farm and began our agricultural project which I call the Tierra Viva Project, there was not one earthworm to be found. And even though we have never added a single one, we found our soil full of them only a year after beginning the projet in a given area.

It is worth mentioning that charcoal is also a major help in managing tropical soils. Charcoal prevent a lot of nutrient leaching and enhances growth of soil organisms. I researched this many years back when I did a research project on a phenomenon called Terra Preta.

In summary, poor landowners would benefit from taking advantage of their own land to supply their own food and perhaps even shelter.