The core of our activities is Rolling Regenerative Agroforestry:
Linking with a dispossessed community like Tchonja, who live in an ex-forest, in this case destroyed first by high grading (harvesting the high-value timber) and then charcoal making (given our track record, we have a long queue of communities who want to work with us as well).
Training family sector farmers, mostly women, as the men are generally 300km away making charcoal.
Build a barn, a seed store and a nursery shared between about 50-100 families (100-200 ha) in a community.
Kitchen, refectory and pantry for common meals. This helps build community as well as make sure that people learn to eat healthier.
This reunites families by making financial sense to be together.
No burning when cleaning fields.
Preparing the soil with shared equipment (1/2 ha per family sector farmer per year) includes a good deal of biochar and live manure.
Installing irrigation, rain-fed agriculture in a climate-stressed area is suicide.
Planting food and trees symbiotically at a density of 2000 per ha, mostly indigenous trees but with some naturalised fruits and nuts (a diagram of succession), making sure that some trees attract wildlife for food and shelter, as they become the vectors for further additions of biodiversity.
Annuals are planted in a strict rotation with appropriate companion plants. These are calculated to optimise a good and nutritious diet, enrich soil life and nutrition, as well as repelling pests and predators.
Add indigenous non-timber forest products, mostly understory plants.
Mulch heavily
Next year, add another 1/2 ha, and continue to develop a new area each year.
Form an association of common interest as it occurs (bottom up, not top down).
Add bees
Always have at least one hectare of productive land, building up to a movement through two hectares at any time.
You can even add chickens or ducks as "tractors"
After four years, there is too much shade in the first plot for annuals, so just let the trees grow; they can look after themselves now. Tree crops can now start to be harvested, and they last indefinitely.
At eight years thin the trees to a natural density of 400 (in nature there are 150-400 stems per ha) and use the thinning for construction poles, charcoal and biochar.
The whole program rolls on, leaving a nascent forest in its wake.
Optimally, we can group 10-20 community associations (about 50-120 families) in a project village with admin, maintenance and commercialisation of co-products.
Where possible, we can then add appropriate technology to value-add and make consumer-ready products.
The whole system can easily be replicated after adaptation to other specific local conditions and cultures.
