Philippines Part 2: Overcoming Native Challenges with Remote Data
In one of the first agroforestry efforts in mountainous terrain, Moscow, Idaho community leader Loreca Stauber, Dr. Anthony S. Davis, Tom Alberg and Judi Beck Chair in Natural Resources at the University of Idaho, and their partners have initiated a program where U of I students travel overseas to work with farmers of Banguet province in the Philippines to develop the skills needed to grow high quality tree seedlings. Local vegetable farmers have historically terraced the mountains that have been forested so they could grow monoculture crops, causing serious erosion (read about it here). The land has degraded so much that the Philippine government has stepped in: warning farmers to begin conservation techniques, or they will take away the land and manage it themselves.
Building a local nursery in Benguet.
Inspiring Students to Look at the Big Picture
One of the steps in helping local farmers to solve this problem is to create a local nursery where they can start growing native plants and trees. Fortunately, the University of Idaho has operated a tree nursery for over one hundred years, and they understand how to grow trees. Dr. Davis specializes in setting up native nurseries for growing native plants all over the world. He says, “I want our students to be exposed to this because we’re graduating students who should be problem solvers, who should be able to look at the biggest challenges and contribute their own ideas towards resolving those challenges.”
Loreca Stauber adds, “We are part of the world and the world is part of us. The students can do more than just get their degree and find a job. Anthony and Kea, when they do this, inspire students to look at a bigger world than they are currently living in.”
Training Students to Understand Native Terrain and Resources
Davis says a good plan needs to take local conditions into account: “The principles of growing trees are actually universal. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in Haiti, Lebanon, Idaho, or in the Philippines. Those principles are the same and they’re readily transferable. It’s how you adapt them to unique local situations that makes a difference.”
“It’s not really about the best way to grow a plant in a greenhouse environment; It’s about the best way to grow a plant that will also survive on its outplanting site.”
Kea Woodruff, former U of I Nursery Production and Logistics Associate, now at Harvard University, says they train the students who go overseas on the “target plant” concept: designing a growing regime based on what the plant is going to need in its future home. She says, “It’s not really about the best way to grow a plant in a greenhouse environment; It’s about the best way to grow a plant that will also survive on its outplanting site. Determining what the outplanting site is and what each species will need to survive on that outplanting site is what determines greenhouse operations.”
Dr. Davis says you need to consider native resources when doing these types of projects. “There could be plumbing there, but there’s no guarantee that when you turn the system on, the tap water will come out. That depends on the seasonality of the rains. It’s part of why we wanted the project partners (the farmers) to have data loggers: so we could look at the data together and get a better feel for when water is most abundant and when it’s most scarce, so it can be stored for later use.”
Overcoming Native Challenges with Remote Data
Decagon (now METER) donated data loggers to the program so that Dr. Davis and other people on the team could look at data with the farmers in the Philippines and advise them when to irrigate. Davis says, “One of the things that’s most important in trying to set up a very remote nursery and manage the production in that nursery from approximately four flights, twelve hours, and twelve time zones away, is knowing what’s going on. There are things that are really easy to ask, like could you send me a picture every Wednesday and Saturday of the nursery, or could you measure the height and the diameter of the seedlings? What’s much harder to tell is how much water is coming in, or what the temperature was during the day or night, because those require people to be monitoring things at a greater frequency than is often possible. If we know how much water is coming into the nursery from rainfall, we can build collection systems so that we can manage where that water goes later on.”
Managing data for both the short and long term is critical, says Davis, because it’s often whether there was rainfall in the predicted amount, and at the right time, that determines whether a seedling establishes or not.
Next week: The conclusion of our three part series: an interview with Dr. Davis and Kea Woodruff, discussing the cultural challenges of reforestation in different countries.
Acknowledgements: The SEAGAA agroforestry project in Benguet is agro and forest; the farmers received a grant from the Rufford Foundation based in the UK to build a greenhouse and much of the water catchment system and auxiliary structure that go with a nursery facility. They also received a sizable grant from the Philippine government to launch mushroom growing as a necessary complement to help support long-term agroforestry. The project is beyond reforestation – it is the growing of trees, shrubs, ground cover, the restoring of watersheds, creating livelihoods, the rebuilding of soil fertility and integrity, the revival of springs which have vanished with the removal of perennial flora, and the restoring biodiversity to bring back the natural checks and balances of a natural ecosystem.
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