Sustainability | Agricultural Training Center in Haiti

The Agricultural Training Center provides lasting,
sustainable solutions that help families improve food security.

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As a “Living Classroom,” the Agricultural Training Center (ATC) teaches and demonstrates the best sustainable agricultural practices to enhance food security, boost nutrition, and promote agricultural-based jobs in Haiti.

Located in Fond Parisien, Haiti (a village in southeastern Haiti), the ATC is a unique place for teaching and demonstrating sustainable, practical farming techniques. Haitian students learn by engaging – seeing, hearing and practicing – gardening methods that are simple, affordable, and will immediately improve the quality of life.

The ATC operates as a “living classroom,” modeling sustainable gardening techniques to improve food security in Haiti. In fact, we offer two courses that teach Haitians how to implement sustainable gardening techniques at home…

1. A two-year comprehensive course for local students
2. An intensive three-week residential course in agricultural training for remote villagers

To date, more than 65 students have graduated from our courses and gone on to demonstrate their proficiency as equipped Haitian farmers.

With the help of our full-time agronomist and partners in sustainability, the ATC was conceived with the intent to reduce some of the disastrous effects of deforestation, poor soil quality, and improper “legacy” gardening methods that aren’t well-suited to conditions in Haiti. These factors lead to the food insecurity that Haitian families experience. While our primary feeding program is the “bridge,” Love A Child also focuses on helping Haitians to help themselves. In the long-run, our training helps Haitians understand how to improve productivity, nutritive food value, and preserve natural resources.

The Agricultural Training Center…

How we teach and demonstrate ideas that work.

Click through the image gallery for complete illustrations that share what it’s like for our ATC students enrolled in classes.

Welcome to Love A Child’s Agricultural Training Center.

The Love A Child Agricultural Training Center is almost 2 acres.

We developed a design to maximize space, emphasize the use of sustainable materials, and minimize dependency on outside inputs (like water, fertilizer, and machinery).

The Director of our Agricultural Training Center is Wilner Exil. As a trained agronomist (who spent years studying soil management and sustainable production techniques in Haiti), Wilner extends his knowledge through classes along with hands-on practical activities, reading assignments, and more.

We offer two unique training programs for Haitians to learn agriculture methods suitable to Haiti. The first program is a 2-year educational training. And, the second program is a 3-week residential program for project leaders from throughout Haiti. Pictured here is our 2-year program. Our extensive curriculum in this “living classroom” offers instruction, along with practical demonstrations of farming techniques.

Up to 40 local young Haitian students in the 2-year training program are able to learn methods on how to grow their own gardens to feed their families and produce income. Students learn how to be prepared for the future using new skills. In addition, we help them learn how to think critically and creatively to solve their real-world challenges in food production.

Students in our 2-year program have both classroom sessions, as well as practical training. Here, a group of students is learning about making compost from organic waste. It is a very simple way to provide rich nutrients to improve Haiti’s depleted soil.

One key agricultural resource we provide is a best practices approach for training students on soils and nutrients. For example, vermicomposting, using earthworms to convert vegetable waste to a 100% natural, organic plant fertilizer, is an easy “best practice” available to anyone. The benefits are huge!

We teach the students how vermicomposting organic wastes and manure produces nutrients that are easily absorbed by the roots of plants, creating healthier plants that are stronger, and more disease resistant. Healthier plants improve crop yields, as well as improve the long-term soil quality.

To assist in overcoming one of Haiti’s biggest farming challenges, improving soil quality, we also educate ATC students in using biochar to help with the soil-building process. Biochar is simply charcoal used as a soil additive. Biochar can be easily made from agricultural waste, and is rich in carbon, holding valuable moisture and beneficial microbes in the soil for many years.

Each agricultural training student, whether in our 2-year program or in the 3-week residency program, receives training and all of the tools needed to start new gardens at their home villages. We stress using appropriate irrigation systems, such as drip irrigation and heavy mulches in areas of low or unreliable rainfall. Proper irrigation can make the difference between a reliable harvest or a dust bowl.

Drip irrigation saves water and fertilizer by allowing water to drip slowly to the root zone of the vegetable plants without watering the weeds. It is beneficial in areas with little rainfall and minimizes problems of evaporation in high winds.

Growing vegetables in tire gardens, also known as container gardening, is one way we help farmers who have little room or inadequate soil for a garden. Re-purposed tire gardens are a great, life-saving alternative in Haiti. One batch of epinard (spinach) is ready to eat, as this farmer starts up a second crop in the next tire.

The students at the ATC are taught how to re-purpose tires into fruitful gardens by turning them inside-out and filling with homemade soil from composting Moringa plant leaves and other vegetation waste. We also make worm farms in the re-purposed tires.

During the summer of 2017, we began teaching our 3-week “mini-term” accelerated agricultural training classes. Students are sponsored either by LAC or other organizations and come from across Haiti to live in this comprehensive residency program. They leave with proficiency as equipped Haitian farmers.

The Simone brothers from La Tremblay, Haiti are three of our recent graduates from the ATC’s 3-week program. For just $725 sponsorship per student, these students are trained to spread their knowledge, working together towards sustainable gardening practices to improve the quality of life in their villages.

Here are some pictures of our new goat project, where we are demonstrating a system called “cut and carry,” where we keep the goats in pens instead of letting them roam free, where they can quickly destroy anything in their path.

With the “cut and carry” method we confine the goats and bring fresh cut forage to them.

Through donors’ recent gifts to “sustainability”, we were able to purchase our first 4 goats to begin our goat husbandry project in our new demonstration goat pen.

Our goats happily munching on fresh forage, showcasing the ‘cut and carry’ method for sustainable nutrition and livelihoods in Haiti.

About the Property

At the ATC, we have demonstration gardens to teach techniques for preparing a seedbed, composting, organic fertilizers, pest control, irrigation, etc. What we teach at the ATC is basically “Farming God’s Way,” age-old methods to improve food production output and nutritional value, while improving and preserving natural resources.

The ATC property itself, which is about 2 acres, includes areas for:

Demonstration and trial gardens
Reforestation tree stock nursery
Bamboo varieties nursery
An edible plant nursery
Appropriate technology demonstrations
Composting and mulching
Worm farm – vermicomposting

Solutions…

Sustainable gardening

In the United States, we often take for granted having plenty of nutritious food for our hungry families, but our neighbors in Haiti don’t have it so easy. When a donor supports sustainability programs like the ATC, their faithful support transforms lives. Our proud graduates will return home with new skills, garden seeds, drip irrigation kits, tools, trees, and new knowledge which they can extend to their neighbors.

Read more about our approach

For more on Love A Child’s work with teaching sustainable agricultural practices, download the full project summary here.

How you can help become a sustainable outreach champion

With your help, we can offer classes, produce a weekly agricultural radio talk show, and spread critical agricultural reform awareness throughout various communities in Haiti.

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Agricultural Training Center

The Agricultural Training Center provides lasting,
sustainable solutions that help families improve food security.

The ATC operates as a “living classroom,” modeling sustainable gardening techniques to improve food security in Haiti. In fact, we offer two courses that teach Haitians how to implement sustainable gardening techniques at home…

The Agricultural Training Center…