Afternoon Tour at SEED

It’s been so hard to blog lately.  Sorry for the silence.  It’s not as if there is nothing going on!  There is plenty, but I find I often don’t have the words for what we are doing/experiencing.  I finally got some pics off of our camera, so I have a few posts to update you on what we’ve been up to as a family.

This afternoon, I took Drew and Tessa to SEED for a tour of their agronomy facilities.  Drew has been saying for over 8 months that he wants to be an agronomist when he grows up and it was our first chance to tour the fields and where they keep their animals.  SEED is a ministry that provides agronomy training to Haitians.  Students take classes to earn a degree and participate in all things agronomy.  Are you wondering what agronomy is?  Wikipedia had a great definition: Agronomy is the science and technology of producing and using plants for food, fuel, feed, fiber, and reclamation.  Here, it also involves animal husbandry as well.

SEED is where we purchase our eggs and milk.  I pick up my gallon of milk every Friday, fresh from the cow.   We pasteurize it at home.  We also get some beautiful produce!  The eggplant parmesan I showed Carline how make this past week was absolutely delicious thanks to the beautiful eggplant we bought from SEED.  Broccoli season is at it’s peak in January, so I bought a ton of it and froze it.  It’s been really nice to have romaine lettuce lately—we can normally only find iceberg in the market in town. They also raise broiler chickens.

Frantz Clotaire, the director of SEED, took us on our tour.  Tessa was most excited to see the animals.  Drew was most excited to see the fields.  Here Frantz helped Tessa pet, then hold this baby goat.  He also showed Drew how they formed the rows to plant beets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We saw fields of rice, cabbage, carrots, beets, leeks, onions, tomatoes, green peppers, hot peppers, and eggplant.  We got to visit the nursery where the seedlings are started and stored until ready for planting.

We saw seedlings for broccoli, tomatoes, leeks, onions, beets, peppers, cabbage, papaya trees, & tropical cedar trees.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then we went out to the fields to find one of the milk-producing cows.  This cow just had a calf a week ago and is a very good milk producer right now!  We watched Frantz move her to a better pasture and learned about the fields of elephant grass they produce for the cows (tall grass) and goats (short grass).  She was pretty happy to moved to a field full of elephant grass—she started eating right away!

Thank you Mr. Frantz for a fun and interesting afternoon!

~Becky