Moringa Tree Project, Cambodia

UPDATES

August 24, 2010

Whilst the wet season in Cambodia brings with it many disadvantages (the main one being that it makes just about any kind of rural development work practically impossible!), it does bring forth a lot of greenery as the crops in the region flourish. Consequently, our Moringa nursery has been doing exceedingly well, even better than we expected! As you can see from the photos below, we have had an amazing amount of leaf growth, so much in fact that we’ve started to harvest some of the leaves and have cooked them up with some of our meals: they are delicious!!

We’ve got two batches growing: the first batch are the ones in the first few pictures below and now we have a second batch also growing which are also growing equally as well. In total we have around 500 trees growing, and we may even plant more yet!! We’ve also finished the nursery itself as you can see in the pictures: the trees are raised on a bamboo platform so that they can drain easily which means they don’t become waterlogged and they are also covered by a shade cloth which still lets them receive a good amount of sunlight but which breaks off the heavy rainfall so that they don’t become drowned! It’s working very well so far!

The next stage is to strengthen the trees up in preparation for transplanting them to Prolit village in October/November. In order to do this we will plant them in larger pots so that they have the space and nutrients they need to develop further. It may be a couple of weeks yet before we can do this, as our farm is currently under quite a lot of water and mud and is rather difficult to access, let alone work in!!

July 16, 2010

Wet Season in Cambodia

Imagine storm clouds building every afternoon, temperatures of 36°C + and humidity in the late 90%. Thunder and lightning starts most days around 3pm, as the skies turn pitch black,  then the wind builds… huge gusts strong enough at times to snap palm trees, everyone rushes for shelter before the rain hits.

Most days this is a normal occurrence in Cambodia during the wet season often followed by flooding.

Some days the dark skies and winds pass without so much as a drop, but most days we get a few minutes warning from nature that the rain is coming and then before you can get under cover you are drenched.

The rain is so heavy – monsoonal downpour is the best way to describe it.

Obviously this has a huge impact on what we can and cannot do during July & August especially whilst the wet season is at fever pitch.

That said the Ecodana sponsored Moringa program, is well under way with the seedlings coming through having been potted in the tree nursery. Recently we planted the Amaranth seeds and they are doing well coming through in their trays.

A few more days and we hope to have the seedlings at the stage where we can start planting them out in the vegetable gardens for maturing and harvesting later in the year!

The photos below show some of the seedling bags but due to the tiny size of the plants you cannot distinguish them yet but to the naked eye the whole nursery is covered in a lush green hue from the minute plants.

Shortly we will have stage 2 of the nursery ready and then we will be able to show you how the seedlings are doing but for now we are making the best of the wet and getting things underway for planting out – if all goes well – remember this is an experimentation project at this stage, in the community late November as the wet season final abates and the dry starts.

June 10, 2010
Hi there everyone,

Just a short update to let you know how we are progressing with the Moringa project. The photos you can see on our project page on Ecodana are of our old organic farm, which was situated in Bakong. Unfortunately, we were forced to relocate from Bakong to Siem Reap in February this year, which is why we are now working in Reul Commune and Prolit village. This was because we ran into conflict with the highly powerful and very corrupt local liscensing authority: Apsara, who basically prevented us from carrying out any development work without first obtaining a permit, which of course we had to pay for. It was a long and painful conflict, which you can read about here if you are interested, but it led to us deciding that there was no way we could carry out the work we had promised to do in Bakong and so we decided to relocate our projects and our NGO HQ to a region where Apsara do not have jurisdiction over.

This meant that we had to leave our organic farm and start a new one from scratch at our new place. We’ve only just managed to get around to working on the farm as we first had to practically rebuild all of our new NGO HQ, which had been abandoned for two years and was not in a good state. We’ve now got to stage where we’re nearly finished there so we moved team members to work on the new organic farm last week. Unfortunately there is a huge amount of work to be done there! The field is overgrown and completely useless as it stands so the first stage is clearing out all of the dead plants and weeds that are growing there so we can transform it into some usable land. Another problem is that it has essentially been used a rubbish dump over the years so there is a huge amount of rubbish on there, which we’ve also had to clear up. We’re slowly getting there though, as you can see from the photos below: we’ve cleared up the back of the farm where we are going to set up the nursery, we’re now working on the front half where we will be planting vegetables and rice for our restaurant. Hopefully all should be ready to start setting up the nursery next week!

June 2, 2010

Hi again everyone,

Over the past couple of weeks we’ve been very busy going out to Prolit village (where we will be focusing all of our rural development work over the next year or so) and carrying out a rather extensive baseline survey of the families there. The aim of this survey was to collect as much data as possible on the families living in Prolit so that we can paint a more detailed picture of exactly what assistance is needed and where. By the end of last week we’d managed to cover 170 of the 196 families there, covering 843 of the 1,048 people there. The results that we’ve compiled are interesting to say the least and so I thought I’d share with you all some of the information that we have found out regarding the food situation in the village.

One of the things that we asked each family to do was to identify the top three problems that they currently face. Lack of food came out as the problem that most families identified, with 86 of the families highlighting it as one of their problems. After lack of food, the next most significant problems that were highlighted were: lack of (clean) water, lack of toilets, poor health and frequent illness and high levels of poverty. With this project we aim to address the problem of lack of food and also the problem of poor health, as the increased nutrition provided by the moringa trees and amaranth will, we hope, lead to lower levels of malnutrition, stronger immune systems and therefore better health for all those that incorporate them into their diets on a regular basis.

Another rather serious issue that emerged was the amount of money that families are currently spending on food. We asked each family to give us a rough estimation of how much money out of their total income they were currently spending on food. A staggering 136 families claimed that they were currently spending more money on food than they were earning, forcing a huge number (over 1/3 of the total families interviewed) to take out loans to pay for their food expenses, which then have to be paid back at an interest rate of over 40%! A large number of families (51) also said that they had taken out loans to pay for medical bills when a member of their family had fallen ill.

The reasons for this are complex, however the two most important factors that emerged from our survey were lack of economic opportunities for people in the village and lack of diversity in agriculture. As one would expect, the vast majority of families have at least one farmer in their family. There are other economic opportunities, such as making baskets and mats as many other of the residents do, but these are severely limited by a myriad of obstacles such as lack of access to markets, lack of training/education, lack of transportation and so on. Consequently, a very large number of families solely rely on agriculture for their livelihoods and a very high percentage of these only grow rice and only grow rice for subsistence rather than for sale. For these families money is constantly going out rather than coming in and they are forced to take out loans to pay even for the most basic of things such as food in the hope that someone in their family will be able to pay it back sometime in the future. Even other families who have other jobs as well as farming are in a similar situation, as they simply cannot generate enough income to provide their family with the most basic of necessities.

Furthermore, the fact that out of the 146 families who said they grew some form of crops, 111 said that they only grow rice also shows why the levels of malnutrition are so high in rural parts of Cambodia such as Prolit: with little else being grown rural families rely on rice to make up a huge portion of their diet, meaning that they lack the essential vitamins and nutrients necessary to stay healthy.

So with this project we hope to address the aforementioned problems in a sustainable way which enables the community to take greater control over them in the future. We will be providing families with a sustainable source of nutritious food which will improve both health and livelihoods, as they will not have to spend as much money on food in the future and their improved health will also lead to less falling in debt in order to pay expensive medical bills. It will not be a be-all-and-end-all solution, but we hope that it will be a significant step in the right direction.

May 27, 2010

Hi there everyone,

A huge thank you to all of you who have been so generous to donate towards this project. This is the first large scale nutrition/food security project that MaD has launched, so no doubt it will be a bit of a trial and error this year but nonetheless we are all very excited about getting it off the ground. Over the past couple of months our Khmer team has spread the word around that we are looking for Moringa Oleifera seeds and so we have had people searching around parts of Siem Reap and Battambang for the seeds which they have then sold to us. This proved to be exceedingly successful: we were only expecting to get around 100 pods (about 1000 seeds) but instead we’ve now found ourselves with around 10,000 seeds (see the photo), which is really great as it gives us more to experiment with and also ensures that we have enough to run the project again next year.

 

A few words about what we plan to do for this project:

The first stage which all those that have donated to have now made into a reality will be establishing a nursery of around 1,000 Moringa trees on our organic farm. We are going to be growing them in rather large pots, with 2 to a pot which will then be thinned down so that we can ensure a higher rate of germination per pot. We’re also going to be incorporating amaranth grain into the project (more info here ) after being in touch with Echo Asia who have sent us some seeds from their nursery in Thailand. This will be the first time that amaranth grain will be grown in Cambodia so this is pretty exciting as well.

Over the next 6 months we will develop the nursery and allow the crops to grow strong enough to be transplanted. We are planning on transplanting them around October when the monsoon season is beginning to diminish but when there is still plenty of residual soil moisture for the trees/crops to grow well. We will be transplanting them to households in Prolit. Over the next year the rest of the project will involve agricultural education, teaching households how to grow the crops well and how to harvest them effectively. Another strong component of the project will be on nutrition education which will teach families about the importance of a good diet and of incorporating moringa and amaranth into their diets on a regular basis. By the end of 18 months we are aiming to have enabled all of the families in Prolit to successfully cultivate amaranth and moringa and to incorporate them into their diets on a regular basis.

We are going to be clearing the land on our new organic farm this weekend and then we will be working on establishing the nursery soon after that so stay tuned for further updates.

Thanks again to all those who donated.

- The MaD Team

February 23, 2011

Hello there all!

Apologies you haven’t heard from us for so long, but to be honest there hasn’t been much to report on this project until the last month!! After we set up the nursery it was just a case of sitting and waiting for the moringa saplings to grow and for the rains to subside. We had a particularly long and heavy rainy season this year, and the rains didn’t properly pass until the end of the year.

 

It was a good thing that we built the nursery that the funds from Ecodana provided us with, as our entire organic farm (and most of Siem Reap) flooded and so there would have been no way that the moringa saplings would have survived (they are very sensitive to water levels when young and particular prone to root rot if they are over-watered). The amaranth saplings that we planted on the farm all died because of this, but we saved some seeds and have replanted them and the new batch is growing well.

Anyway, at the beginning of the year we were finally able to give the green light for phase two of the project. We held a meeting in Prolit where we discussed the benefits that the trees could bring to families and the community as a whole. The meeting was relatively quiet at first, but it soon got very noisy and quickly doubled in size. All the families that attended said they were willing to try growing the trees, and we will be holding more meetings in the future to extend our reach to the rest of the village. As mentioned in a previous update, lack of food was the number one highlighted problem in Prolit when we conducted our baseline survey, so this project will be a big step forward in combating that.

A few days later we transplanted the first trees and we have now transplanted a total of 13 to Prolit. As expected, a few of them didn’t make it but the team are learning fast as to the best conditions that the trees will grow under in the local environment. All of the growing guides on Moringa say you have to plant them in full sun, however we found that the full sun in Cambodia is too strong for the trees and so the ones in full sun were dying whilst the ones only planted in half sun were doing much better! Needless to say, the team have changed tactics and the newly transplanted trees are doing much better. You can see some pics of them in the photos!

Stay tuned to our facebook page (www.facebook.com/madcambodia) and our website (www.madcambodia.org) for future updates!