Agroforestry is biodiversity!

I'm in the Vienna airport. The layover was only 5 hours and I kind of thought it would be better to just sit and relax. But I sat there thinking about it for about a half hour then grabbed my bags and headed through customs. There's a direct train to the city centre that takes 16 minutes. I didn't really have a plan and didn't have long anyways so it was really just a stroll around the city centre. I passed a couple of nice cafes that I should have stopped at but kept thinking I would find a nicer one. Which was a mistake since I never did and had to get back on the train without drinking Viennese coffee. Next time Vienna!

There are many communities here that have extremely uncertain land situations. They may have been living here for 20 or 30 years, but new national parks and forest reserves keep getting established, the laws are unclear, and generally people's futures are just up in the air. You can see it in people's eyes when we are talking to them. They just don't know if they might get kicked out of their homes tomorrow. But a good news  story: one of the villages we visited has recently struck an agreement with the local authorities to implement agroforestry plots on forest reserve land. The first photo shows a young agroforestry plot started by one farmer. This has rattan,  fish tail palm, fan palm and several other species that are at the same time forest species but also can help families feed themselves and make a living. The owner of the plot is eating and selling food products as well as shingles made from palm leaves. The forest dept took notice, and after some negotiation, has agreed to have villagers try out these innovations on about 3 hectares of reserve land. The second photo shows part of that area where this will soon be happening. It's the classic win-win scenario. Farmers get to feed and cloth their families, and the park gets greener, better protected land.

Pigs are an excellent way for a family here to supplement their income and diet. Lots of small  scale farmers do raise pigs, but there area couple of  interesting things that UHDP (the organization we are partners with) does to help farmers with that. One is that they loan a sow to a farmer.  When there are piglets, the farmer has to pay back the program with two pigs for the one he or she receives. This  is a popular animal loan  model originally  developed by Heifer Project, but now used by programs around the world. In this way, the farmer gets a pig for very low cost, and the program gets to keep distributing more animals. The second thing is that UHDP  promotes composting pig pens.

Yesterday we visited a village where two microhydro generators have been installed. This project was actually sponsored by another organization, but we were the ones who provided the idea and the training. The connection is kind of convoluted since this other organization and ourselves are part of the same network. So the research we did on microhydro gets out to another organization, who sets up an exposure visit to our Farm Research Centre, and farmers from this village get the idea to install hydro generators, which they do. Now two 3 kilowatt generators are running full time on river power through that blue pipe you see, and providing light to 30 homes. a daycare centre and the local  church. It's sort of the butterfly effect in that a seed of  an idea eventually switches on  lights in people's homes.

The unthinkable happened. i was sitting waiting for my flight to thailand and a big new airbus 380 pulls up to the gate. so that was good because the 380 is cool. But looking around at the gate I didn't see a whole lot of passengers--maybe just scattered around I thought. I boarded and sat there waiting for more people to get on. I kept wondering why it was taking so long to load this plane. At some point I came to the realization that the flight was far from full. My seatmate in the aisle realized this too and had the presence of mind to stake his claim on an empty bank of seats leaving me with aisle, mid, and window to myself. Plus 3 pillows. I am living the dream now. I got to lie down and have a real sleep like a civilized person. You have to understand empty flights rarely happen anymore. With all the codesharing and fancy scheduling technology even having 1 empty seat beside you is unusual. Even this flight was shared between 4 airlines and they still couldn't fill it. Couldn't have happened at a better time though.

This is it. The last trip for a while. Well, actually I have another trip next week, but that one is vacation. I have already decided the first 2 days of that trip will involve absolutely nothing. I may not even leave my room. But right now I'm focused on Thailand. This I expect will be a relatively easy trip thankfully. Mostly community visits, a chance to talk to farmers and take pictures. Plus it's a known quantity. So less surprises. Someone asked  me today how many times I've been to Thailand. I'm not sure really, but I  would guess at least 20.