The Bower Family Chronicle: Agriculture News

For us farmers, wherever we are in the world, either in the cold north where there is only one growing season, or in the hot south where we have numerous growing seasons, we have one thing with which to make money: the SOIL. I have always believed that for a farmer to be successful he has to manage and care about his soil. For a farmer in Haiti he really has no other recourse with which to sustain his life or family. A typical farmer has between 1-3 acres to work which is usually so steep that the average American has a hard time walking up it, much less farming or sustaining life with the small amount of soil that’s left after the intense, burning sun and the torrential downpours. For any person that works the soil to produce nutritious food sometimes it just feels like a war. A war against nature itself; like we just can’t stay ahead of the pest, weeds and diseases. As I have spent the last several years working with Haitian farmers and traveling around this county, I have never seen the war as intense as it is here compared to anywhere else in the world. I have heard of numerous agriculture projects of different ways to raise their yields and stop erosion and reforest a country where only 2% of the forest remain and millions of dollars have been spent with varying success. But……. In the end it all comes down to the soil.

We had the blessing of having Dwayne Bowman, Trent Graybill, and Jason Miller come to Haiti and spend a week with us, teaching on how the soil works and how God created the soil to be a living, breathing thing. We were able to go to four different communitys’ doing teaching to about 175 farmers. It was amazing to see the response and interest that the farmers gave and to see their thirst for knowledge and teaching. For some farmers that burn their fields off clean every year this was the first time they heard the idea of keeping the organic matter to decompose to build soil life. For other farmers, every time they found an earth worm they killed it.This was the first time they heard that earthworms were beneficial to the soil. Dwayne and Trent did a wonderful job teaching about soil and sharing that God created this world for us to share and keep.