Breadfruit Trees have transformative Global Potential - here's the evidence !

 

Effective for Global Food Security - Environmental and Social Remediation - Wildlife Protection - Resource Use - Increasing Precipitation (!) - Soil Improvement - Pesticide and Fertilizer Reduction - Carbon Removal -

Breadfruit has it all - and at a cheap prize: Compared to all other methods and technologies, Breadfruit Agroforestry is more cost-effective and already proved in everyday practice.

The world is in dire need of new technological improvements - sodium batteries, deep gravitron / plasmadrill geothermal & gravity batteries are among the few that come to mind, which sound like promising alternatives to current unsustainable methods - but humble Breadfruit Agroforestry is perhaps the most really fundamentally revolutionary and transformative method at our current immediate grasp.

The 4th (or so) Agricultural Revolution would already be here, transforming the world (directly in the tropics and indirectly in the temperate and arctic countries) if comparatively little effort and investment could be attracted to the endeavor. We are speaking towards the tune of the prize of a software company like Activision-Blizzard here, less than ~$70B. This impulse would synergistically transform the world towards durable peace, beauty, health and prosperity. If that sounds like just another farfetched dream, the basic and realistic facts are laid out in this comprehensive PDF document (~3 MB file size)

X-Prize Carbon Removal with Breadfruit

We have prepared the following PDF document to illustrate the far-ranging possibilities of upscaling a simple method like Breadfruit Agroforestry.

The main focus of this publication is on carbon removal as it was originally intended for the X-Prize competition, but the full spectrum of predictable social, economical, environmental and general implications of up-scaling of breadfruit to cultivation as an emerging mayor staple crop are detailed in light of up-to-date scientific literature.

Download Breadfruit Potential PDF (3 MB file size)

In further posts, we will highlight and zoom in on the various sectors in which breadfruit can have globally transformative impact. 

So please stay tuned for more.

Adapted Grassroots Tropical Development

 

True development is only possible from the ground up. It wouldn't make sense to leave the largest part of the population behind, especially in most tropical countries where small-scale subsistence farming constitutes the backbone of all economic activity.

Here we present cutting edge agro-technologies practiced by ourselves since many years only with the means readily available in rural African areas - in the transitional zone between the humid and semi-arid tropics. 

By necessity as well as from conviction we have limited ourselves to the simple means we had at hand - which means machetes, hand-held hoes, spades and water buckets - without any machine based irrigation or tillage, with neither pesticides nor mineral fertilizers.

So we know from our own experience that our breadfruit trees are the hardiest and most reliable of plants - they survived practically without losses where most other plants have succumbed - enduring months long droughts without any precipitation even when they were tiny and yielding incessantly already when they had reached only 5 years of age. Now, upon entering full maturity about 6 years after planting, they are becoming extremely high yielding, surely surpassing all starchy tubers such as yam and cassava that are commonly grown, without any of the drawbacks of these plants, such as causing extreme erosion and necessitating very high labor input.

The same extreme endurance applies to vetiver, pigeonpeas, gliricidia, mucuna and all the other constituent plants employed in our farming system, once they have reached sufficient heights and densities.

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A Tribute to Jeff Marck, Global Breadfruit, Evergreen Agriculture...

 

First things first. Without inspiration from Jeff Marck's website, Africa's Breadfruit Revolution, we would have nothing.  It's the only viable business model for us - because we can only do something that is environmentally sustainable and protective towards native animals, where we don't need pesticides, no additional fertilizers and no irrigation.

Without the kind help of the Global Breadfruit company, we could never have obtained these extraordinary trees. They even shouldered a huge fee at the airport when we collected the batch order for different parties in Ghana about 6 years ago and the airport employees arbitrarily imposed a huge sum out of the blue to extort money from the breadfruit buyers - even though all import formalities had of course been duly arranged for in advance. If Global Breadfruit hadn't transferred the demanded amount at once, our trees would have withered at the airport. We hope, future orders will work more seamlessly for the sake of Ghana - currently, the situation at the airport seems to have changed thoroughly towards the better - anti-extortion warnings are now to be seen everywhere at the airport and last time we travelled, no-one there dared to demand any amount.

Prof. em. Dennis Scanlin has developed a range of solar dryers, which we will adapt to Ghanaian conditions (highly corrosive climate, termites) by building them from concrete and other impervious and readily available materials.

We will employ solar dryers such as Prof. Scanlin's Appalachian Dryer here and the larger kiln-version thereof to produce large amounts of breadfruit flour, for example.

Further big inspirations towards our goal of a farming system that can provide food security in all of the humid to semi-arid tropics without burdening the environment and which shall be easily applicable even to small-scale farmers are:

• Vetiver System: provides fence-like protective barriers against invading cattle, goat, sheep and the like, as well as firebreaks

• Evergreen Agroforestry: When our system will be fully matured, we'll farm under a full canopy of leguminous fertilizer trees

• Pigeonpea Groundcover: our own discovery, these perennial plants are the only way to stop weeds such as tall grasses (e.g. invasive cylindrica imperata), invasive Chromolaena odorata,  and most of all the rampantly laid bushfires.

• Glyricidia trees are fast-growing nursery and fertilizing trees

With such allies, we are looking forward to a bright future, that would look utterly bleak without them.