Eco-farming in Fiji.

• Author: Kane, Hal
• Position: Integrated farming in Fiji islands

In a promising agricultural experiment, a boys' school is linking five different micro-industries so that the waste from each becomes a key input to another.

Last November, a 72-year-old ecologist named George Chan met with four other men on the largest island of Fiji - one of the remotest countries on Earth, lying 11 time zones west of Peru and three zones east of Australia in the South Pacific - to plan an extraordinary experiment. Chart is an advocate of integrated farming, which in principle means using the waste of one agricultural industry as fertilizer or fuel for another, in a loop that will dump little or no pollution into the environment. What Chan planned now sounded almost too good to be possible: from the sludge now being discarded by a large Fijian brewery, five healthy new enterprises would grow. What was now a troublesome pollutant would be turned into crops of fresh mushrooms, chickens, fish, vegetables, and fuel for electric power.

The site of the meeting - and of the prospective experiment - was a school for disadvantaged boys', called Montfort Boys' Town, where the students traditionally have helped raise both food and funds by farming fish in ponds. With Chan were two of the school's teachers, along with a bearded professor who is considered the world's top expert on mushrooms, and a Belgian business executive from the U.N. University in Tokyo, who had brought the group together in the belief that this experiment could have widespread benefits around the world.

Fiji was chosen for several reasons: it is poor, and integrated farming offers a way of bringing efficient, sustainable agriculture to low-income developing countries without introducing the problems - such as heavy pollution, vulnerability to pests which plague monocrop farming, loss of jobs to mechanization, and heavy export dependence - that accompany large-scale conventional agriculture in many such countries. Fiji also has an established fish-farming industry, so the new business would not be entirely alien. But most important, Fiji is facing a ticking clock: its largest agricultural industry is sugar, and there are signs that that industry could go into a serious decline within a few years. Fiji needed something to shore up its endangered sugar export economy.

The Montfort Boys' Town was chosen because it offered a ready environment for such an experiment. Montfort's students arc all low-income (many are orphans), and the school puts strong emphasis on practical training for local industries - so many of the students were already familiar with traditional methods of fish-farming. Thus the school's labor would produce both food and income. And the experiment would link the students' education to their country's need for a more productive, less polluting economy.

Beer and Mushrooms

Outside the Montford School dining room where the five planners met, just a few hundred meters away, the experiment is being set up. Chan takes me to see it; we go through a wood gate, jump over some muddy spots, and climb down some embankments to a reed-thatched hut - the place where the mushrooms will grow. The hut looks like a traditional Fijian home, the kind that was common before corrugated metal became the standard roofing material on the islands and scrap metal became a common material for walls. It is one room only, with the thatch covering both roof and walls.

Chan gestures, proudly telling me that the hut was built by the students of Montfort Boys' Town, using the same techniques that have been used here for centuries; they cut structural members from mangrove trees on the school's land, and hand-gathered reeds for the thatch. If this were a house, a family of perhaps five or six would sleep on mats on the floor, two or three to a bed. But instead of a family's meager belongings, rows of shelves fill the hut. On each shelf, mushrooms will grow in large plastic tubes.

Soon, these tubes will be supplied with brewery waste, a wet mash rich in chemically-bonded carbohydrate that animals cannot digest, mixed with rice straw, sawdust, or shredded newspaper. Mushrooms produce an enzyme that unlocks the processed grain, allowing the mushroom to extract its own energy for growth while leaving behind a residue that can be used as food...