Mexico: Cottage Grove woman transplants hydroponic gardening to Mexico
Much of the problem stemmed from the way Cancún, a major tourist destination on Mexico’s southeastern tip, sprang into existence in the 1970s, Durham said.
“Back then, business people were looking for a place with the best weather and the best water — a place to build a big tourist resort,” she said. “Workers were brought in from other places to clear the jungle in exchange for being given a piece of land, and huge hotels and golf courses were built to attract tourists. There was nothing there to support the economy except tourism. Everybody was imported.”
Unfortunately, the soil in the area was limestone and rock, not good for farming, so much of the food to serve the newly created city of Cancún had to be imported from other places.
“That was a big problem for the people who were trying to make a living there,” said Durham, who now splits her time between Oregon and Mexico. “They couldn’t grow the foods they needed, and they couldn’t afford to buy the food that was imported. There was a lot of hunger.”
She began to mull over what could be done. About that time, “I read somewhere about some New York City restaurants that were growing food on their roofs,” she said. “Then I got to thinking about hydroponics, and I thought that might be a good way for the people living in Cancun to grow better food for themselves, and maybe even a way they could market their produce to the hotels and restaurants there.”
Durham started reading online about hydroponics and discovered the nonprofit Institute of Simplified Hydroponics, dedicated to “provide support for those people who are most in need,” which they estimated to include “200 million families that could benefit from home gardens based on simplified hydroponics.”
She sent the institute a message and described the situation in Cancún and her concern for the people living there. “I had a response within 24 hours,” Durham said. “It said, ‘That’s why we exist.’ ”
In a “small world” moment, it turned out that although the institute is located in Missouri, its founder, Peggy Bradley, is a graduate of Oregon State University.
Bradley’s Institute of Simplified Hydroponics already had two dozen projects going in Central America, South America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia — including one in another part of Mexico. After conferring with Bradley, Durham made her plans, moved to Mexico in 2011 and set up a laboratory to mix the 13 liquid nutrients needed to raise soil-less vegetables and begin teaching the residents of Cancún — mostly women — how to do it.
“Hydroponic vegetables grow in a third to half the time it takes to grow them in soil, they need much less water than traditional gardens, and there are fewer bugs and diseases to worry about,” Durham said. “The people in our project are growing tomatoes, radishes, lettuce, carrots and peppers, and they taste fabulous.”
One church congregation in Cancún wants to teach its entire congregation to grow their own hydroponic vegetables, she said.
The vegetables in Durham’s nonprofit project, which she calls Forever Changing Lives, are grown in raised beds, either made of PVC pipe with holes cut in it for the plants or in rectangular plots lined with black plastic and filled with material — called substrate — such as vermiculite, pebbles or fiber to stabilize the roots of the plants so they don’t topple as they grow larger.
The nutrients are critical to the process and have to be customized to suit the water in the area where the plants are grown, depending on how much of what minerals it contains and its level of alkalinity or acidity, said Gordon Goodell, also of Cottage Grove, who has become an active participant and spokesman for the group.
“It takes a lot of time and experimenting to get the nutrients correct and find exactly the right substrate,” Durham said, “but after 18 months, we have pretty high confidence in what we’re doing and that the people who live in Cancún can carry it on.”
A secondary project will be to gradually introduce vermiculture — the use of worms to create soil from food scraps — which is an even simpler method that also can be sustained indefinitely, she said. “With the nutrient solution, you have to keep replenishing it. With the worms, they create the soil from plant waste to grow more plants.”
Mostly women have joined the hydroponics gardening project, for a couple of reasons, Durham said.
“There are many women who have come down from the mountains to escape abuse or try to find work, and once in Cancún they get into relationships, have children, and then sometimes the relationships end,” she said. “They are living in poverty, without the means to support their children. And many of the men have become part of the narcotics trade, so it is too dangerous for the women and children if they are around, so many of the men have left.”
Since starting Forever Changing Lives, Durham has attracted a loyal group of Lane County residents who have given financial support to the project, on top of the personal savings she invested to get it under way, including constructing a building to house the laboratory and teaching space.
Some, including Goodell, have traveled with her to Mexico to help set up and calibrate the hydroponic beds and teach the people there to maintain them.
“There are five people in the community there now who are completely trained, and there’s a husband and wife who are managing the project,” Goodell said. “That’s the idea, to set it up and make it something they can continue. It’s such a reward to see people growing their own food and feeding their families, who couldn’t do it before.”
Source: registerguard.com