Sunday Times 2
Bringing the forest back to villages
I would like to name this idea as “Bringing forest back into villages.” It sounds strange. But what it means is simple. As we all know we have cleared forests to set up villages. Most of the deforestation was done in this process.
The British cleared much of the hill country forests to plant tea; more forest areas were cleared to facilitate coconut and rubber plantations. The next massive clearing of forests was witnessed during the expansion of paddy farming under different agriculture development programmes. So now we have insufficient forest cover.
In ecological agriculture we are promoting, we bring gardens as close to forests as possible. It is sometimes described as “analogue forestry”. The steps are:
1. Protection of top soil erosion by building ridges along the contours, mulching (covering of soil with organic matter),
Ecological farming: Agriculture gardening begins with planning
2. Growing of as many trees as possible, grown to different canopies, to capture maximum sunlight and also to reduce theaggressiveness of rainfall that intensifies erosion.
3. Recycling of all organic matter, avoiding the burning of such organic matter,
4. Having as much diversity of crops and animals, avoiding monocrop farming,
5. Mixing animal waste to improve soil fertility.
6. Avoiding the use of agrochemicals such as chemical fertilizer, weedicides and pesticides,
7. Maximising biodiversity of plants and animals.
So, this is similar to growing a forest in your home garden or the farmland. In effect what we do is to enable what happens in a natural forest to happen on your farmland and home garden. This has tremendous benefits such as increased yield, natural improvement of soil fertility, avoiding the use of poisonous input and reducing the expenditure on input (all eternal chemical inputs are imported, expensive and damages environment and pollutes water, food and air).
Cluster farming approach
To do this effectively we have to adopt a “cluster farming” approach. This is one way in which a marketable surplus can be produced. For instance, if we grow two mango trees, two coconut trees, two trees of avocado pares, one jak tree, two lime trees, two orange trees, guava and some vegetables on a quarter acre home garden we will have hundred times of these trees on 25 acres of land. Since many villagers have only small plots of land they have to do this in a “cluster.”
In many of the proposed programmes of rural development such as “ApiWawamu Rata Nagamu,” Divineguma, Gemidiriya, Gama Neguma and Samurdhi Movement what is proposed is to do home gardening. But this total concept is not utilised. What we do is to promote this approach in all our home gardening.
We do some planning of the garden when we begin. Deciding what trees should be grown where. We generally look at the agricultural aspects only. But there is an important architectural aspect to this too. In terms of how to maximise water and soil conservation, how trees have to be located, where a well should be dug and so on. This architectural aspect becomes even more important when we design for a community land area, for a GS division, Pradeshiya Sabha area or a province. It includes residential areas and housing, play grounds, roads, space for animal grazing such as grassland, temples and other religious places. Some space has to be left for animals such as elephants, monkeys and wild boar. Water catchment areas have to be left uncleared. There should be sufficient food for animals.
Further this concept could be extended to large monocrop coconut plantations and also tea plantations. It is possible to think of dividing up large monocrop plantations into smaller plots and they are given to villagers for ecological farming. It would be possible to do this on a share cropping basis where the land owner is given a share of the crop.
The final idea is to transform the entire country into ecological farming. This farming can also be described as regenerative farming, since the net result would be a regeneration of the land and environment.
We have done this in many areas and have found to be effective. Now the Agricultural Department has agreed to promote ecological farming in all parts of the country. However there is no serious thinking done still about the architectural aspects of planning human communities. So, it is in this field that we want to do some new thinking.
Solving the problem of higher education and employment
The idea of starting an ecological agriculture university is useful. Doing this is one way in which some of the serious problems in education and employment could be solved. There are more than four million children attending school and their parents would like to give them higher education so that they could get attractive jobs. Three hundred thousand students sit the GCE advanced level examinations and around 120,000 pass with sufficient marks to enter universities annually. However, universities admit fewer than 20,000. Thus more than 100,000 best qualified students are left out. These young people are not given attractive opportunities of higher education and professions (livelihoods). Therefore every several years young people rebel to capture power hoping to create a system that can usefully include them.
If these young people are provided higher education in ecological agriculture, they can find attractive livelihoods by training others in ecological agriculture.
A group of young people can be given a short training in ecological home gardening. They can engage themselves in training a village community in transforming their gardens in to ecological farming. Such transformation of a quarter acre into ecological home gardens will provide a gardener family an additional income of around Rs. 3,000 a month. This is our experience. If the family getting these instructors to visit their home garden weekly to guide them and pay them a remuneration of about Rs. 500 month, such an instructor can earn around Rs. 15,000 a month working with about 30 families. This is quite a good remuneration and a satisfying job. These young people can then go for higher education in agro ecology and become scholars attending lectures over the weekends. It is not too many to have hundreds of thousand such scholars since they will be increasing the productivity of land and of the whole country. There would also be massive savings in health, water and soil fertility improvement. Maximising the benefits of sunlight is another advantage.
An architectural issue
How to accommodate the increasing necessity of housing and community settlements while increasing the forest cover is an important architectural issue. How this concept could be extended to towns and cities is another important issue that has an architectural aspect. How coconut plantations and tea plantations could adopt this approach has an important architectural aspect that has to be worked out.
There is a trend today of breaking up coconut estates and selling them for housing as small plots. They are sold as “developed land”. This is destructive. There is little attention given to the damage of cutting down trees and accelerating soil erosion. This has to be stopped. It can be done by adopting proper architectural measures to do housing while preserving trees and preventing soil erosion.
In the early days there were village settlements designed to have a sustainable system where the “wewa” was protected with a reserved catchment area, “Kattakaduwa” a reserve to prevent salination of water, some space for buffaloes to bathe and graze. Some space for paddy and some space for chena cultivation. Medicinal plants, meeting timber needs, fodder etc. were looked into. Thatching of roofs was done with cadjan and walls of the houses were built with mud. Cow dung was used as plastering of walls and the floors. This illustrates the approach of systematic planning and architectural approaches advantageous to nature.
(Sarath Fernando is advisor to the Movement for National Land and Agricultural Reform)