Day 9 Learning Soil Regeneration Techniques

Yesterday, Wednesday, the class convened. Apparently, the word is spreading about the big compost pile. Our class is growing, 2 more camponez joined us. This day's class would be about terra preta, green manure and building raised beds. But we started with a review which would require an electrical hook-up which required borrowing the generator again

Nothing is easy in rural Angola. Nothing can be taken for granted.

I wanted to show them a picture of a compost pile that I had previously shown them on the very first day of the composting class. A picture of an Indian compost pile composed of sugar cane stalks.

And I wanted them to compare that to the compost pile that they had built all working together as a Cooperative. A compost pile that Ipersonally thought was the best I had ever helped build.

Next I showed them a picture that I had taken the day before on the outskirts of Lobduimbali that showed what a program of composting would make obsolete slash and burn agriculture. The camponez agreed that burning was wasting good composting green and brown material.

The classwork entailed another PowerPoint presentation with several downloaded You Tube videos graphically demonstrating terra preta of Amazonia, green manures and raised bed horticulture: all aspects of soil regeneration. They were rapt. And from one of their questions, I determined why. They wanted to know if the Amazon was really a river or was it a sea. They had never seen nor heard of a river that one could not easily see the other side. I assured them that this was a river and that ocean going vessels could navigate the first 3000 kilometers of it.

We discussed all these novel soil regeneration issues at length and agreed to meet the next day to build the first raised bed. We gave the requirements for a site and asked that they, as a Cooperative, decide exactly where to build it.