Ecuador's flower growing technology helps improve food production
Ecuador's flower growing technology helps improve food production
ABC Rural By Sarina Locke
Updated yesterday at 6:49pmTue 18 Nov 2014, 6:49pm
The South American nation of Ecuador grows flowers like Australia grows sheep. It's an export industry worth $800 million to Ecuador, and floriculture is teaching farmers how to grow better food crops.
Benito Jaramillo was perhaps an unusual choice for a meeting of the world's most innovative food producers at Rabobank's F20 conference, as his principle crop is flowers. "We don't sell food we sell emotions basically and it's a part of life. We need more emotions, more personal contact in the world today."
Mr Jaramillo is president of a summer flower company Valleflor, that employs over 280 people, with sales of $7 million. He also presides over multi-million dollar potato and dairy businesses. But it's flowers that have taught Ecuadorians a lot about protected cropping.
"We've become very efficient in those two industries by shifting some of the technology from the flower industry," he explains. "It's allowed us to grow in potatoes and dairy, in irrigation and in pest management, when to get the best growth, when to get the nutrients, everything goes around irrigation system.
Six thousand hectares of flowers are grown both under greenhouses and in the open. The industry employs 100,000 people, and more than half are women. "The industry started about 30 years ago and it prevented people migrating from rural areas to the city. So you find a lot of women that have been able to stay closer to home and have a very good job," Mr Jaramillo said.
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http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-19/ecuador-flower-growing-improves-food-production/5902034
= new reply since forum marked as read
The article goes on to discuss the lack of farmers as advisers in the councils of government and big finance (and efforts to correct this), and the world food production crisis--though it doesn't get into the biggest creators of the crisis, the transglobal corporations pushing and forcibly imposing pesticides, GMOs, monoculture and other toxic and farm- and farmer-killing regimes.
I believe that Mr. Jaramillo (president of a flower company) is right that farming solutions will come from developing countries. However, I'm not sure that he means the same kind of farmers that I'm thinking of--small peasant and Indigenous farmers, whose agricultural knowledge and wisdom comes from thousands of years of experience. Jaramillo is president of a very big company.
Michael Pollan ("The Botany of Desire"
tells the tragic, instructive story of the Irish Potato Famine and how it could have been avoided if the Irish had known what Peruvian Indigenous farmers know and have always practiced: planting MANY varieties of potato (as a hedge against crop failure). (The other cause of the Irish Potato Famine was the English, of course, who violently acquired all the best farm land and confined the Irish to scrub land where only potatoes would grow; and, also, ignorance all around, that the monoculture of only one variety of potato WILL FAIL).
One other thought: I immediately thought of companion planting, as I read this article (but the article never goes there, or only vaguely alludes to it). For instance, tomatoes and parsley are companion plants--i.e., grow much better in each other's company, nobody knows exactly why (or nobody I have read knows). I've seen the benefits of companion planting time and again in my own garden. It is a top principle of organic gardening and farming. Another example: onions help fruit trees. Companions no doubt aid in deterring plant disease and unwanted insects. Certain flowers (French marigold; nasturtiums) are known to reduce unwanted insects across the board, for all desired plants.
I THOUGHT that this was where the article was going--the benefits of planting certain flowers with food crops, but it is more about applying the practices of big flower farming to food crops. I'm not sure what this article (and its sources) mean by "protected cropping" (learned from large-scale flower farming, applied to food farming).
