We’ve been so grateful to The Grove Community Church in Riverside for their support of Bright Vision over the last few years. Every year they have a Love Offering, in which the church gives towards projects around the world (and in Riverside) that are proposed by their global and local ministry partners. For 2022, The Grove has financed the expansion of our Agriculture Program. The plan was generally to restart irrigation farming, raise animals, invest in permaculture, and be able to more effectively reach out to the community through all of it. Here’s what’s happened and is happening:
1) Preparation
In July we were able to hire a tractor to clear our land and also turn the soil of the five acres we have near the dam in the village. Our agriculture team and people looking for temporary work worked to break up the large clumps of hard soil in preparation for planting. We engaged a local company to come and survey our land for the prospect of doing irrigation farming with a solar pump. We also worked on refurbishing/expanding the small storage house we have on the agriculture land, so that it could accommodate the new pump and keep equipment secure.
2) Training
The company who sells the solar pumps provides training for both the use of their pump but also the planning of the actual farming. They came over three days and helped the staff understand how to set up and use the pump and how to do simple maintenance. They also helped plan the layout of how the land would be used and irrigated. They drew out a plan for where the water should be pumped to, and then using gravity to move the water throughout the field. The second part of this was getting some refreshers on creating good compost using the materials cleared from the land and animal manure throughout the village.
3) Delays
You can always expect some delays in any plan. Ours came in the form of forex (foreign currency) shortages here in Malawi. We paid the company for our solar pump, but they could not exchange that money into US dollars in order to make the purchase of the pump in South Africa. They eventually found a company in neighboring Zambia who they could purchase from. But the forex shortage has also resulted in a fuel shortage, so getting the pump to Malawi was a challenge as well. In the meantime we were preparing seed-beds for cabbage, tomatoes, and onions that we could transplant into the prepared land when the pump arrived. We thank God that the pump has arrived, even if a few weeks late!
4) Planting and watering
When the pump arrived it was time to transplant hundreds of cabbage and tomato seedlings into their respective places (onions are slow-growing and will be moved soon). It was pretty exciting to finally get the vegetables into the ground and use the solar-pump to water them. I was a bit skeptical of the amount of water that could be moved, and if there would be enough power to pump uphill. But it is moving a lot of water with no issues. I was out at Bright Vision this weekend and was so impressed by the system that the staff has set up to get water throughout all parts of the field.
We can’t say “THANK YOU” enough to The Grove Community Church for their continued partnership. The staff at Bright Vision have done a tremendous job of implementing the new plans and they are excited about the ongoing opportunities that irrigation farming presents. (More updates on the animal side coming soon)
