Opok Farms Discussions

Opok Farms Village Updates (Q1 - 2008)

There was a lot about the Opok Farm project that I'd promised to update everyone on as last year ended, but things got too hectic and now I'm sitting among boxes getting ready to move out of my house tomorrow, and here it is already January. So instead of an end of year report, this has turned into a beginning of the year report. What is it they say? Better late than never. I've been writing it for quite some time - today is the day to finally post it.

There is LOTS happening at/with/for the Opok Farm project over the next few months - much of it will keep Norbert and I offline but I will try to post updates here as often as I can through about mid-April (when life should calm down for a little while and I might finally have time to start a new thread.) I would very much appreciate it if others could help out with reposting these updates to the Opok Farm pages at facebook, Razoo and GiveMeaning.com

stay tuned

Last comment added: Wed, 26 Mar 2008 14:32:40 PST

Updates from the Farm (Dec 2007)

The Opok Farms group was featured in the Razoo bi-weekly digest last week, so I thought it high time to update folks with where we're at with this project. Still in search of the best platform to use for discussion about all this, for the time being (connectivity allowing) I'm planning to cross-post this update at facebook, ned.com, and on the Razoo Resettlement for child-headed households: Uganda community blog. Linda will hopefully also post these updates on GiveMeaning.com where the proposal we put together on Razoo is currently live for funding. If you're a member of more than one of those networks, please feel free to respond wherever you feel most comfortable.

There's actually lots of news to share, so this update is broken into in 3 parts that I hope to get out within the next couple of days. First an update from the farm fields - see below! Sometime early next week I'll post an update on plans for the Opok Farms Community, and then a roundup of the virtual community that's been rallying so enthusiastically around this initiative.

Last comment added: Wed, 09 Jan 2008 15:07:10 PST

Ways to support Opok Farm

Can we list different ways that people can contribute to and support Opok Farms here? They do not need to be financial ways!

Vote for Opok Farm Village - Uganda on Razzo for a possible $10,000 in support to build community.
Make a one time contribution or a monthly contribution toward clearing the land for farming.
Contribute to the discussion on building community in the Opok Farm Village.
Contribute to the discussion on planning the building of the village.
Contribute to the development of the wish list for the CARE Resettlement Training Funding Proposal.
Contributing to the discussion of the ecology of Opok Farm.

Last comment added: Tue, 01 Jan 2008 00:28:20 PST

Ecology at Opok Farms

I would like to re-open the discussion started by David Bale at omidyar.net on ecology, wildlife and ecotourism possibilities at Opok Farm.

There are no comments.

Photos from the Farm!

August 2007 - our first planting season

First plowing

Look at that black soil!

More to be posted here soon... there's quite a few more uploaded to flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/lif einafrica/sets/72157602209556835 /

Last comment added: Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:11:24 PDT

Kenaf and other Half-Baked Ideas

I've been following the discussion on bamboo with interest. It's not uncommon for people to develop "pet" plants in development circles. I'm certainly not suggesting that the bamboo thread is spurious--and not so subtly suggesting this thread may be. An example of what I mean by a "pet" plant is hemp. Oh hemp has such complicated human stories that go along with it. There's a surprisingly good movie from 1999 Grass that tells a bit of the story of the criminalization of marijuana in the USA. One interesting fact is that industrial hemp is not an oxymoron. The current focus is on fiber, but historically the seed oil was probably more important commercially.

As useful as I think hemp as a crop is, I'm not really an advocate for it, because it seems such and uphill battle against entrenched interest.

However a fiber crop that has been getting a great deal of attention in research is Kenaf. That plant has piqued my imagination. There are a couple of persistent ideas that keep circling around in my head. The first is rather speculative and the second has a bit more practical application, even if it's not specifically about Kenaf.

So the more speculative first. One of the great imaginative architects today is Shigeru Ban. He is well known for his use of paper tubes in constructing buildings. Among the paper tube buildings he's best known for are temporary houses built for the victims of the Kobe earthquake in Japan. His paper tube construction was also used in the refugee camps after the Rwanda genocide.

Shigeru Ban is also notable for recognizing the need to engage architects in the great problems of humanity. He saw doctors and engineers giving their time and wondered why architects didn't. So he was influential in starting Architects for Humanity.

Shigeru Ban makes wonderful buildings which engage my imagination not only as buildings but in his innovative use of materials.

Kenaf interested me at first because it's and African native in the family Malvaceae--hollyhocks--a family of plants represented in my garden by many pretty and useful plants. An annual it can grow to heights of as much as 20 feet in a season. The leaves make excellent forage with a high protein content. And the stems are fibrous. The outer fibers are longer and strong, good for cordage for example, those fibers constitute about 30%-35% of the dried stem by weight and are called bast fibers. The remaining fibers from the core are shorter--fluff. Both have uses.

Getting a load of cardboard tubes for Opok Farm Village doesn't seem very practical. Paper mills are very capital intensive plants. However paper has been made since antiquity. So small scale paper making isn't completely out of the question. Indeed art papers are a documented cottage industry for export commodity trades from small scale enterprises in Africa.

Somewhere along the line reading about potential building materials made from Kenaf I saw that a simple paper can be made by floating the bast fibers--the bast fibers and core fibers are separated in a conventional hammer mill operation--on a screen. Quite a while ago I bought some cards from LiA. The cards were wrapped in banana fiber, so the result would be something like that.

I do suspect that rolling Kenaf paper tubes with similar rigidity as the commercial tubes Shigeru Ban uses would be quite difficult on a cottage industry scale. However rolling tubes doesn't seem that hard to imagine--at least I can come up with rough versions in my head as to how I might make such machines.

In soft soils and when holes are dug with back hoes, often paper tubes are used as easy concrete forms, say for footers for pole buildings. So it occurs to me that even relatively floppy paper tubes could be stiffened with mortar for example and then filled.

Another material that Shigeru Ban has experimented with is papercrete. Obviously I haven't tested any of my wild ideas, but the potential for using Kenaf makes me dream of all sorts of applications for it.

There actually is quite a lot of organized dreaming about what to do with Kenaf on an industrial scale here in the USA. There are even paper mills operating using the domestically produced crop. But one of the things holding back the pace of development is seed. To set viable seed requires more frost free days than many of the areas where Kenaf is being grown. So I wondered about growing Kenaf seed for export in Uganda.

Actually I think a lot about seeds anyway. One of the big challenges is to come up with ideas that scale well. One of the ideas that I've told everyone I know with a computer in Africa is that a seed exchange seems like an idea that would scale well. Nobody has ever taken the least bit of interest, still I think it's a good and practical idea. At least it's an idea that a database would be useful for.

When the discussion has turned to essential oils and herbs, something that has occurred to me is that it would be useful to experiment growing theses in small plots, just to see how they fare and how to grow them. Many of these plants can be grown from seed but are more practically propagated vegetatively. But the point is that for a small investment a small but very varied garden of commercially important herbs could be started from a small investment in seed. The main thing would be the investment in time and attention to the project. Not all of the plants would grow well or find people wanting to grow them, but I believe the chances are good that some one or another of the plants would find a market as nursery plants.

That's a bit off the subject of seed exchanges. Really commercially seed production is a tough business, although one that African growers do succeed in--for example most of the new marigold cultivars come from African growers. But the practice of seed saving is something that is ideally dispersed. Small quantities by weight have value.

The connection between LiA in Gulu and Kampala is a great one. Urban gardens are something that are increasingly important for income generation in cities. Mostly those growers need seeds for fast growing greens. The Opok Farm Village could be a supplier of seeds to urban market growers.

With the recent floods, and in particular the damage to ground nut crops, the hungry season will be extended from 2 months to 10 months in many areas. Governments are encouraging people to grow fast growing crops to make the gap. But I wonder about the availability of seeds for such crops.

In any case a systematic seed exchange where growers provide seeds in exchange for other seeds seems like an institution which could benefit a whole region in so many ways.

Individual farmers generally feel little incentive to experiment with new crops. But a seed exchange might provide just enough encouragement for more diversity. It's something that wouldn't take too much money to begin and could scale.

Certainly I would encourage Opok Farm Village to grow some small scale experimental crops. For example experimenting with Kenaf wouldn't take too much to begin with. A single packet of seeds, if the seeds were collected could begin experiments which have some probability of paying off, just as the herb garden plants would. Even if commercial results weren't quickly forthcoming the information gained would be valuable ans significant.

So there's two half baked ideas for today: 1) Kenaf the potentially useful fiber crop; and 2) a Seed exchange data base at Opok Farm Village.

Last comment added: Sat, 29 Sep 2007 23:05:30 PDT

Accumulating information

This is going to be a thread where questions can be answered. Any kind of question related to resources, human or natural or man made.

Last comment added: Thu, 18 Oct 2007 21:01:22 PDT

Village - Urban Planning

The very best communities I have been in have been given some thought before they were built. We need to think about some of this in order to set up water supply and sanitary systems.

I would like to use this thread to start to think about the general structure of the village. What "institutions" do we need? School is obvious. There is already talk of a park. A market? A communal kitchen?

What kinds of houses do we want to build? What does the weather require? In Thailand, kitchened are outside the house. How about in Uganda?

Maybe a park with a performance pavilion in the center of the village?

Can we brain storm this for a while? Being a visual kind of person, at some point I will want to start drawing pictures.... now that is a scary thought!

Last comment added: Thu, 31 Jan 2008 10:00:18 PST

Community at Opok Farm Village

One of the most important aspects of a sufficiency economy community, in my opinion, is the community. Community is where you find support and where you can find help in times of trouble but also and maybe more importantly, a group to share and celebrate successes with.

The King of Thailand has proposed the Sufficiency Economy Philosophy as a development tool starting at the very lowest level. At the very lowest level you have the people who in someways are the most fragile (and in some ways the strongest!). They are the people who feel even a slight change in circumstances in their gut -- literally.

When the Asian financial crisis hit Thailand in 1997, it was the poorest of the poor farmers who got hurt the quickest and the hardest. And they felt that crisis in their stomachs, with nothing to eat. Volume-wise, they were not hit the hardest but someone who loses a real estate investment is much better able to handle that shock. The more you have, the safer it is to take risks.

Sufficiency entails three components:

moderation

reasonableness

a self-immunity system, i.e. being able to cope with shocks from internal and external changes.

Two underlying conditions are necessary to achieve this sufficiency:

knowledge (breadth and thoroughness in planning, and carefulness in applying knowledge and in the implementation of those plans are required)

morality (people are to possess honesty and integrity, while conducting their lives with perseverance, harmlessness and generosity)

What I want to talk about here is the development of community as a part this system.

Last comment added: Sat, 29 Sep 2007 21:29:48 PDT

Growing bamboo at the farm.

I'm told bamboo grows in Uganda. Do any of you know if there is bamboo near the farm?

It is am amazing building material that grows very fast. In four years or less we'll have bamboo that is very strong that we can use to build with. Bamboo can be used to make thousands if things... from food to clothes to tools to music.

I have been dreaming about making a huge dome out of bamboo, and filling the inside with hammocks, swings and tight ropes... and covering it with canvas tarps. A lot of people could sleep in there. It would be cheap and easy to construct.

On the US gulf coast after hurricane Katrina I set up a 60ft dome a and it served as a community center where we fed 1000 people a day. A friend from LA even flew down to do an aerial show hanging down from the top of the dome... check the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E Zfr6TxHEIU

I'm a circus freak with a hula hoop and found we can make domes out of those too, using the circle of life design. We started working on it at my project in Mexico, but didn't have enough hoops to make a full dome: http://actionhero.smugmug.com/ga llery/2570014#136656674

Bamboo can also be used for making hammock stands... and I'm keen to set up a sewing room for hammock production at Opok Farm.

I'm stoked to have found you all!

This is gonna be fun!

-Cor www.actionheronetwork.net

Last comment added: Sat, 23 Feb 2008 11:23:19 PST