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.