Quarter 3 Narrative Report TAMTF Vermiculture project

(Vermiculture farming and biohumus production at rural youth club in Nalbandyan village in Armenia – Development Principles NGO)

Reporting period: October-December, 2007

Overall Progress
In October the works were done to prepare the new territory fro vermiculture farm (please refer to previous report) and transfer of remained worm beds there.
First two rows were processed and around 650 kg of biohumus was received (around 13 bags). The following activities were conducted:

· the nearby territory was cleaned from weeds to prepare for tree-planting in future.
· the floor was covered with concrete.
· the compost with worms was placed on the concrete, preliminary covered with some layer of hay. It is expected that from this amount of compost around 7-8 metric tons of biohumus will be received already this spring.
· from already produced 650 kg of biohumus around 200 kg will be used for planting the greens and herbs using small pots. The grown greens and herbs will be marketed in the local market and in Yerevan’s supermarkets. Overall, 500 pots with greens were prepared and placed in small hand-made green-houses to prevent the freezing. The harvest is planned to yield in spring for market.
· in November the beds with worms were covered with thick layer of hay, since the temperature was lowering, while in December the hay layer was made larger up to 50 sm in height.
· the new compost is being prepared now (around 10 metric tons), in May the worms will be placed onto new compost as nutritional substrate.
· Regular training sessions are held to the children engaged in rural youth club.
· The youth group made an Information, Education and Communication campaign to bring local public to the understanding of importance of composting and using worms for biohumus production to promote organic agriculture in the region.
· The training materials for Vermiculture and Biohumus production have been developed and are used widely within the community.

Problems Encountered
The following challenge has been reported:
Realization of produced biohumus:
Usually rural inhabitants in Armenia were using dried manure for their fields, as well as for fuel in their remote stoves. The concept of vermicultuer and biohumus application for agricultural production is relatively new for Armenia and the region. Therefore special efforts were made to orientate the general public in this issue.

The youth club children together with their adult leaders conducted an IEC campaign to promote composting and using biohumus for agriculture. Special presentation was made at the village council. As a result, many villagers expressed their willingness to buy biohumus for plant production. However, the problem is that people cannot pay for biohumus now, they are going to buy it in Spring, therefore the biohumus sales are postponed for Spring.

Another feature of potential customers is that they want to borrow biohumus, and pay only after the harvest. This is usual problem for all farmers and rural peasants in Armenia and the region – lack of cash in hand for agroinputs procurement and early spring field work (cash for diesel, rent of machinery, seeds etc.). The rural people possess cash only after harvest an further marketing their produce.

All above facts will serve for redesigning our marketing strategy for biohumus production. Thus, there was identified a group of clients who are asking for worms, not for biohumus, in particular for their fish farms. Therefore, it was decided to divide the available worms beds into two groups and start two scheme of farming: 1. directed towards worms production; directed towards biohumus production. In first case, the nutritional substrate will be limited to promote worms reproduction, in second case – the more manure is composted; the more biohumus volume is produced.

Thus, currently there are three marketing plans for this project income generation:
Biohumus production;
Worms cultivation;
Growing greens for human consumption (fresh greens for the table!)

It is planned to move the project into all above directions to overcome market limitations.

Beneficiaries.

Currently most active group of students consists of 16 schoolchildren.
They participate in training sessions, including peer-to-peer and IEC campaign, as well as directly participated in planting the greens into the pots for later marketing the produced greens in the supermarkets.

Plans for future:
1. Continuation of regular on-site and in-class training sessions to the children.
2. Review of educational materials developed for this project and their publishing with financial assistance of Heifer International Armenia.
3. Training to the trainers of other YES clubs on vermiculture and biohumus production as requested by DP partners in Armenia.
4. Marketing of worms, biohumus and grown greens.