(We are currently in a hiatus, since current circumstances won't allow us site maintenance or any activities beyond our core duties - Donations would still be welcome, though ;-)
"Save the World with Breadfruit" - how on Earth could that ever happen?
By first providing rural small scale farmers an incentive to change their slash & burn strategy. Secondly, with these super-hardy tissue propagated breadfruit trees such as e.g. supplied by Dr. Diane Ragone's Global Breadfruit, total food security in the tropics is finally attainable. Only the word has to be spread.
As side effects, the natural vegetation and wildlife will be protected, as farmers will protect their ultra-yielding food and cash sources from the currently still rampantly laid bushfires - the ash, smoke and dust clouds of which for example reach from West Africa annually unto the Amazonian basin to change the weather patterns there, according to scientific studies (via triggered cloud formation). This ties in to carbon sequestration and thus climate change prevention. This also ties in to increased precipitation above forested areas, as has been demonstrated in various studies.
For all this, the farmers, who constitute the majority of populations all over the tropics as well as the backbone of economies there, need a reliable farming crop and easily reproducible system using only the means readily at everyone's disposal there.
All of this, these special breadfruit trees provide.
They don't need pesticides at all. They usually don't need any fertilizers and irrigation, even in the semi-arid tropics.
They can be tied in with various other plants in agroforestry and permaculture systems, e.g. Evergreen Agriculture.
They are higher yielding than the staple crops customarily produced - even during exceptional droughts.
Also, they prevent erosion and degradation of soils.
With breadfruit, it is possible to produce many healthy, highly nutritional food varieties, including bakery items. When they are dried - which is possible with carbon-neutral solar driers - the fruit can be processed to flour. This flour can be mixed with cereal flours to produce dough and bread and such
with a lower glycemic index and higher nutritional value for health foods.
We are currently experimenting with fresh breadfruit fruits to make gluten free bakery goods:
According to their glycemic index, breadfruit are suitable for diabetics.
As such, they should be a great opportunity for tropical small scale farmers to export to all parts of the world. Thus they could further increase their income.
With raised standards of living due to this income and all the aforementioned advantages, the people in the tropics would be freed to e.g. be in furthered pursuit of educational endeavors, pay school fees, obtain quality health care and improve their accommodations. They would enjoy more leisurely time and experience less existential stress, since additionally the breadfruit farming systems are inherently minimally labor intensive.
Such raised standards of living have been proven everywhere in the world to even reduce birthrates and cause a reduction of emigrational levels.
To achieve a sufficiently wide distribution and pan-tropical promotion of these immense advantages leaf-tissue-propagated elite varieties of breadfruit trees offer, they have to be brought to the attention of governments in the tropics, who subsequently will have to either ease the importation of elite breadfruit treelets (they are phyto-sanitarilly absolutely unobjectionable, because there is no substrate attached to them that could spread pathogens) or even provide domestic leaf-tissue propagation facilities to distribute the trees to farmers. That is because breadfruit trees don't usually produce seeds - except in rare cases, but these seeds as well as traditional propagation methods (such as air layering) don't produce reliable offspring trees, while tissue propagated trees are absolutely reliable in every case.
At the same time, even in the subtropical, temperate and arctic regions of the world, people and the environment would profit from cheap, healthy nutritional products, enhanced food security, carbon sequestration and thus climatical stability, less atmospheric pollution, more reliable weather patterns, less pesticides deployment, reduced immigrational levels, more available qualified potential employees and more stable, peaceful political relations in a global win-win-win environment.
It would not be the first time an Agricultural Revolution has fundamentally transformed livelihoods and environments on a global level.
As mentioned initially, this is only possible by integrating at a grassroots level even small scale farmers by maximally cost-effective economic incentives - all of this is easily fulfillable with breadfruit.
Our immediate Goals:
- Finish our family owned simple rural hostel with attached demonstrational agroforestry farm
- Build an Appalachian Solar Dryer and Solar Kiln with adapted and durable local materials
- enable us to process the dried Breadfruit to flour and various other healthy products and to perfect our methods for bakery without the use of additional wheat flour
- purchase some further tissue-propagated Breadfruit trees to fill up our farm, because we have given too many as donations and a laid bushfire has destroyed some of the trees when they our farming system was still too young and vulnerable
- also we wish to include a larger variety of additional other fruit trees and such in our agroforestry intercropping project - we will also encourage other farmers to copy our model of leaving native trees and other plants interspersed on their farms
- provide a modicum of income for our family business and employees
- we don't seek to grow beyond that for ourselves, but rather envision a win-win-win including income to small-scale farmers, the environment, wildlife, prevention of laid bushfires and so much more
( this description is just a work in progress - we won't be disappointed if in its current form it would not generate enough trust to invigorate donators to contribute at once. So we will will continue to add to it and our media presence to really show earnestly our claims are valid. We just have to start somewhere, somehow; which is here and now. )