
Help Kevin use permaculture to feed his community
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Hello , I'm Kevin Ouma from Homabay County, Kenya, a permaculture and syntropic agroforestry practitioner. I'm also the founder of Kanyanjwa COMMUNITY farm PROJECT, which was formed in the year 2020, mainly to create sustainable development/living in the community. I am delighted with the progress we have made in training community members on how to grow organic food through permaculture and syntropic agroforestry. This has seriously helped to reduce poverty, food shortages and malnutrition control among vulnerable people in the community. On the farm, we are happy and proud to have different types of plants, vegetables, fruit trees, among others. Bill Mollison, the founder of permaculture came up with the principle 'use what you have'. Our resources are rare. We didn't have the resources to make a reasonable fence for our project for example. Instead, we made a temporary fence to prevent cattle from invading the farm. Cattle are usually left to graze lazily and they enter the farm and destroy our plants; painful and demoralizing as we use a lot of energy to do this peaceful work and spend a lot of time on it, then it becomes destroyed by the cattle. Losing the seeds is not easy either, as we have to buy the seeds and seedlings, which are expensive, to get something to plant in a bare land. To help contain this, we're planning to create a reasonable fence. This will seriously reduce the workload on the farm, causing us to plant more and harvest more. Another challenge is the water challenge, the main reason that made me write this text. Water, in addition to being necessary for survival, is fundamental in agriculture. We have to walk no less than 20 km a day to fetch water for our plantations, and this water is not always of good quality (usually stagnant). This really gets tiring and also makes us not have enough time on our farm. The community also depends on this water for drinking and cooking, which is unhealthy as stagnant water is unhealthy and prone to waterborne diseases such as billharziah, typhoid and cholera and sometimes also causes death from diarrhea. We need resources to buy a water tank of 1000 litres (£900), fencing (£700) and a poultry house with young ones (£1000). If you want to contribute money we would like to thank you heartily. Our community and the one who speaks thank you for your attention! God bless you all!
UPDATE from Jane - The first large sum has been transferred - took a while to work out how to make the banking systems work, but now it's done!
UPDATE from Jane - The first large sum has been transferred - took a while to work out how to make the banking systems work, but now it's done!
Organizer
Jane Venn
Organizer
England