**Please note this trip occurred in February 2020, before there were any known cases of Covid-19 transmitted person-to-person in the Western Hemisphere.

Once a year members of SHI’s Board of Directors visit one of SHI’s three programs in Central America. This year they visited SHI-Panama, with local headquarters based in the province of Coclé. For over 20 years, local SHI field trainers have employed SHI’s 5-phase regenerative agriculture program while working directly with nearly 500 families. During this trip, board members had the pleasure of attending a graduation ceremony celebrating the accomplishments of 33 participants. Board members also assisted partnering families with farm projects that ranged from harvesting compost latrines to planting rice. Here, Katherine Gundling and Edith Cecchini, board members and co-chairs of SHI’s Donor Engagement Committee, reflect on their experience.

At a ceremony held in La Candelaria, friends and family members celebrated the achievement of the 33 farmers who completed SHI’s 5-phase regenerative agriculture program - photo by Robert Horton.

NEVER TOO OLD TO LEARN
Have you ever witnessed men and women in their 50s and 60s receive a graduation certificate? It’s a moment of joy and pride, the recognition that they are not too old to learn new things, and a testament that no matter what your age, you can always improve yourself and the world around you.

As two board members of Sustainable Harvest International, the organization providing the graduation certificates, we were proud, too, and humbled on this first day of our trip.

CELEBRATING A COMMITMENT TO GROWTH
There were 33 graduates this year, ranging in age from their mid-20s up through their 60s. Five years ago, each of these new graduates made the choice to commit to SHI’s program because they had heard it would improve their crop outputs, provide a greater diversity of nutritious and organically grown food, and eliminate the use of agrochemicals and the need for slash and burn farming, which was continuing to deplete the soil and destroy the rainforest. And now they are celebrating the evolution of their farming skills and success with family members, friends, field trainers, and SHI board members. Along the way, their community had been indelibly transformed.

Celebrating with the graduates right out of the gate was the perfect start to our trip, and over the next several days we visited numerous active participants who were engaged in various phases of the program.

José Santos with his daughter, Vanessa, and their seedlings – photo by Sarah Kennedy

With their new wood-conserving stove, Martina Villarreta and Vicente López related that the amount of firewood pictured above can now last 3 weeks, instead of just 4 days - photo by SHI’s Founder + Director of Strategic Growth, Florence Reed.

REGENERATING HEALTHY SOIL
We visited a family that had joined the program a year ago and was just completing phase one of SHI’s program; their land had been stripped of trees and the soil was depleted due to slash-and-burn practices. Slash-and-burn provides ash that infuses the soil with nitrogen, which in turn helps crops to grow – temporarily. After several continuous seasons of this process, however, the nitrogen is used up and the soil is more depleted than it was prior to the trees being cut down. This necessitates more rainforest being chopped down and burned. SHI’s methods focus on building healthy soils and encouraging biodiversity by diversifying crops, selecting plants that can benefit each other, and using organic compost from locally sourced materials.

We witnessed firsthand the vast and ongoing improvements to the soil and emergent surrounding forests. The sheer variety of crops was astonishing - pineapples, orange and lemon trees, coffee plants, yucca, hibiscus plants, and a large assortment of vegetables. Several families had also worked with the SHI field teams to create rice paddies and fish ponds, while others had mastered the art of growing soldier flies to create a protein rich feed for their chickens.

GOOD FOR THE FARMERS, GOOD FOR THE EARTH
The health benefits of SHI’s programs are not limited to the gardens. Each family works with a field trainer to build a new, clean and efficient woodstove to replace their conventional fire pit. These new stoves produce only a tiny fraction of the previous smoke and particulate matter, which is good for the air and good for the cooks. Martina Villarreta and Vicente López in the community of Aguas Claras proudly demonstrated their new stove to us, and explained that the same amount of firewood that used to be consumed in 4 days is now sufficient for up to 3 weeks. Not only does this save the surrounding trees, it frees up time for the wood gatherers to pursue other activities, such as schoolwork. Multiple pots can now be heated at different temperatures, too.

GLOBAL CHANGE, ONE FAMILY AT A TIME
Tying what we saw into the bigger picture, we realized that Sustainable Harvest International is contributing directly to about half of the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals, one family at a time. The transformation of these communities is profound, with SHI’s methodology leading to improved food security, nutrition, and livelihoods for farmers, drawdown of carbon, and improved critical ecosystem services. Indeed, SHI’s work in Panama and other Central American countries over the past 20 years has had multiple profound impacts; almost 4,000 farming families and in-country field trainers have planted over 4,000,000 trees, prevented the deforestation of over 30,000 square meters of forested land, and restored the soil, while creating healthier, self-sufficient families and communities that are able to share their knowledge with others. It is humbling to realize that, in contrast to those of us who depend on grocery stores and transportation systems to receive our food, these families are almost entirely self-sufficient; they create little to no waste (which is generally composted), and they prepare on-site, delicious meals that are based on fresh foods from their own regenerative organic gardens.

At the end of our trip we felt deep gratitude for the dedication of the farmers and the SHI Panama staff, and freshly committed to the reality that we can all do something to leave the planet in a much better state than we found it.