Hi, My wife and I currently own and (barely) maintain a 10 hectare (24acre) tropical food forest in Rioja, San Martin, Peru. Actually, we're considering selling a portion of it, as it won't fit with the rest of the livestock rotation I'm planning. The food forest was planted a little over one year ago. This year I'm planning to add dolomite to all the trees (that looks like the best amendment after interpreting my soil analysis).
At planting time, we gave every tree 1kilo of compost, 1kilo of super bokashi, and a couple hundred grams of rock dust. The soil results took too long to get back, so I didn't add dolomite or lime, since I was waiting to see which would be better.
This is currently what we're doing to maintain the property:
This level of maintenance is rather costly. So I was always planning to rotate animals throughout the property with electric fencing. Problem is, we've never reared large livestock before. We have a lot of Brachiaria spp. grass and there are some other species that cut you like a knife. Horses, don't really eat most of the grass. For example, they won't touch the Brachiaria, which is probably the majority of the grass we have. Cows like it though, but how big should trees be, before you run cattle? I was thinking about running tropical sheep (We have F1 Dorper mixed with Pelibuey available here locally), but I've read that Brachiaria is poisonous to sheep. I wish that Peru had the miniature Brahma breed that was developed many years ago by researchers in Mexico. Peru, as far as I know, has never placed value on breeding smaller cows. There are a lot of nice options here if you want some huge tropical cattle, but I'd rather get the smallest breed possible, because my main goal with them is just to reduce my annual maintenance bill as much as I can.
It would be cool to use something like this for the maintenance:
However, I know this sort of expense is out of the question. Even if I wanted to spend about $20,000 more on shipping, taxes and customs down here in Peru where they gouge you hard on that sort of thing (18% sales tax anyone?), there would be no one out here that knows how to service one of these. It's fun to daydream about using a crazy piece of equipment like that, but I could probably hire people to weedwack for about 20 years before equalling the purchase/delivery cost of one of those units. Also, our rows are only 2.77m wide (we did a triangular planting pattern with 3.2m between each tree), so the equipment would have to be pretty small to fit. Another consideration is that our slopes are pretty intense (not sure if that's clear on my video).
Sheetmulching and other "gardening" techniques are not relevant at this scale, so I'm open to hear what suggestions are best. Outside the box thinking is welcome. For example, I was thinking about using a crop-duster to spread dolomite and compost tea, but this is a very low-tech part of the world. I guess I should be thankful that we have access here to new, Japanese-made weedwackers.
I'm about to set up some perimeter galvanized mesh fencing on an area that's about 1.7 hectares, where I plan to rotate muscovies (this is essentially the native range of the Muscovy's ancestor). My goal is to divide the area into 8 cells, and develop a flock of 600-700 adult birds. It's a big risk in my opinion, because we've had disease outbreaks before in the local village. Recently there was an outbreak of (we think) avian cholera that killed about 75% of everyone's chickens, turkeys, muscovies, and guinea fowl. It also killed my adult male peacock and one of the peahens, which was a devastating loss for us. Fortunately, before the outbreak, we moved 14 of our 16 Muscovies to the remote property, and none of them have died since then. My thoughts are that by moving the Muscovies to this remote property away from the village, the birds will not be exposed to neighbors' birds, and will also be moved to fresh pasture every 4-5 days, which should (in theory) do a great deal of disease prevention. I plan to put a couple strands of electric line. One on the outside of the fence closer to the ground, and one a few cm above the fence line, to help prevent predator problems. I guess that's another topic for a different thread though.
Anyway, that's a small business idea, that helps maintain at least a small portion of our property.
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