Project Overview
Commodities
- Fruits: avocados, bananas, citrus, figs, papaya
- Vegetables: eggplant, greens (leafy), okra, peppers, sweet potatoes, taro, tomatoes
- Additional Plants: ginger, herbs, trees
- Animals: fish, poultry, swine
- Animal Products: eggs, meat
Practices
- Animal Production: aquaculture, livestock breeding, manure management
- Crop Production: agroforestry, alley cropping, conservation tillage, contour farming, cover crops, crop improvement and selection, cropping systems, crop rotation, fallow, fertilizers, grafting, intercropping, irrigation, no-till, nutrient cycling, nutrient management, strip tillage, varieties and cultivars, water storage, windbreaks
- Education and Training: extension, Website
- Farm Business Management: agritourism, cooperatives, farm-to-institution, farm-to-restaurant, farmers' markets/farm stands, grant making, marketing management, value added, whole farm planning
- Natural Resources/Environment: biodiversity, hedgerows, riparian buffers, soil stabilization
- Pest Management: mulches - general, mulches - living, mulching - vegetative
- Production Systems: agroecosystems, aquaponics, integrated crop and livestock systems, organic agriculture, permaculture
- Soil Management: composting, green manures, organic matter, soil microbiology, soil quality/health
- Sustainable Communities: community development, urban agriculture
Proposal abstract:
This project is a rebirth of a popular island Professional Development Program grant, the Portable Extension Office for Program Literature Exchange (PEOPLE). It will represent be a web-based library that supports the most recent iteration of the Guam SARE New Farmer curriculum for our island's subsistence and small limited resource commercial producers. Its design addresses issues and needs identified in surveys of small farmers under the Chamorro Land Trust agricultural lease program who face difficulties in compliance with the minimum agriculture production requirements. Information used in this curriculum comes from; local, regional and national sources. At the moment there is no single curated archive or website to direct tropical island farmers wishing to explore the concepts in more depth.
In 2000, the PEOPLE project provided island agricultural professionals a CD containing a curated collection of digital publications from USDA websites and nonprofits, selected for their relevance and appropriateness for tropical island communities. It identified many out of print publications from the Pacific Islands on tropical production, digitized them for the collection. This project’s website will update the original PEOPLE collection, maintaining grey literature digitized on the project site, while linking to source sites for online publications. It will expand the collection with new relevant materials and websites developed since PEOPLE including webinars and videos. Island agriculture professionals now have web access, however many of their clients still do not, so this project will also provide the project sites with printers and printing supplies to expand the agriculture professionals’ sustainable agriculture information dissemination efforts. The project will focus on two key areas through several objectives: expanding the informational resources and include new media developed in the past 20 years. But it will also train agriculture professionals though zoom trainings on the use and dissemination of this information.
Project objectives from proposal:
1. Increase Pacific island producer and agriculture professionals access to needed information resources from the PEOPLE collection, and relevant print and other media (project and youtube videos) that addresses information needs identified by farmers in these grants through a curated web page based on an easily updatable publication/media database. Also to add to the digital text media with webinars and youtube videos relevant to the island context. We plan a complete update and expansion of the original PEOPLE publication dataset. We hope to continue that projects' effort to identify relevant "grey" literature.
2. Enable INSPIRE project site staff to effectively implement print and media dissemination by providing each of nine sites, a "print on demand" and video streaming computer and printer system with supplies.
3. Increase staff knowledge on use of the computer system, website, and the breath of information resources available through the website database and how they might be used in outreach programs.
4. Determine the extent to which publications, videos, webinars, and other forms of instructional media distributed through the website are used by or impact producers and agricultural professional in our Pacific island region and survey for topical areas needing further development.