Our flagship Land for Life Project began in 2012, originally established as a 10-year program. It now supports over 500 families in the area surrounding Pico Bonito National Park, Northern Honduras, who have given up the practice of slash and burn and switch to sustainable agriculture, improving their food security and livelihoods in the process.

We are working with each family to implement the flexible Inga Model in the way that will best meet their individual needs. Alongside Inga Alley Cropping, we are also providing them with support to establish fruit-tree crops and to reforest areas of their land (read about the Inga Model here). Each new family has been asked to plant a small number of Inga trees as an orchard to provide enough seed for a further three families to take up alley cropping.

We work with the communities living in two key river catchments which border Pico Bonito National Park – the Cuero and the Cangrejal River Valleys. At present, we are aiming to bring on board 40 new families each year and so far this year it looks like we will not only achieve that target, but exceed it by a wide margin, bringing us to a total of over 163 families involved in the project (by September 2014)

The Cuero and Cangrejal Valleys are of critical conservation importance, as they border Pico Bonito National Park, including a large area of primary tropical rainforest home to jaguars, pumas and howler monkeys alongside a biodiverse wealth of other species.

The Park also provides important ecosystem services, including maintaining and regulating the flow of the area’s rivers and preventing soil erosion and landslides on the steep mountainous terrain. Slash and burn farming is a major threat to the Park, with much of the buffer zone already degraded by subsistence farming practices and the core zone increasingly at risk.

Las Flores Project Center

A key element of the Land for Life Project is the establishment of our Project Center. In 2012 we purchased a seven-hectare piece of land in the Cuero Valley on which to set up the Project Center, which includes a demonstration farm to showcase the benefits of Inga Alley Cropping, an Inga seed orchard, a tree nursery, education facilities and a cash crop processing plant.

Since 2012 we have made great progress in getting the Project Center up and running. The Inga seed orchard has been planted, and we produced our first crop of over 200,000 seeds in Sept 2014. A large tree nursery has been constructed and currently houses over 75,000 seedlings, including cacao, rambutan, mahogany, and of course Inga. The Inga alleys for the demonstration farm are growing pineapple, plantain, malanga (taro), datil bananas and we are developing pepper.

In the long term, the Project Center will serve as the nerve center as we work to spread Inga Alley Cropping across Central America. It has the capacity to host courses, allowing groups from across Central America to come and see Inga Alley Cropping in action both at the center and in the local area, and then disseminate the knowledge of this revolutionary alternative to slash and burn within the communities where they work.