Project Overview
Annual Reports
Commodities
- Fruits: bananas, figs
- Additional Plants: native plants, ornamentals, trees
Practices
- Animal Production: feed/forage, pasture fertility
- Crop Production: conservation tillage
- Education and Training: extension
- Farm Business Management: new enterprise development, value added, whole farm planning
- Natural Resources/Environment: afforestation, biodiversity, soil stabilization, wildlife
- Pest Management: prevention
- Production Systems: holistic management, permaculture
- Soil Management: organic matter
- Sustainable Communities: new business opportunities, sustainability measures
Abstract:
This project meets the needs of extension agents, producers, and land users by creating a concise, practical, user-friendly information resource for traditional Pacific island tree species. The project produced a series of 10–32 page fact sheets for 73 of the most important agroforestry species in the region. Each fact sheet provides information on products, uses, interplanting applications, environmental requirements, propagation methods, and cultivation techniques.
Project objectives:
To strengthen NRCS and CES agent understanding of and proficiency in Pacific island tree species and their products and uses;
To meet the defined needs of NRCS, extension, and other agricultural professionals by creating concise, practical, user-friendly species profiles (8–16 page fact sheets) for fifty outstanding Pacific island agroforestry species;
To produce selection tables of the fifty species sorted by associated crops, agroforestry uses/products (i.e., windbreak, timber, fruit), and five climatic zones;
To distribute a searchable CD with live internet links and a reproducible, bound and printed set of the species profiles and selection tables to fifty NRCS, CES, and other agricultural organizations in the American-affiliated Pacific islands;
To publish the species profiles on the internet (www.agroforestry.net) for viewing in HTML (using a web browser) and downloading in PDF format (for reading with the free Acrobat Reader) for at least a three-year period;
To assess the effectiveness and benefits of above objectives by conducting a follow-up survey of recipients three months after distribution of the completed species profiles.