Climate Change is Not a Myth - Just Ask Our Farmers

"Developing countries are bearing the brunt of climate change now. It's not something that might happen in 10, 20, 30 years time," Helen Clark, the administrator of the U.N. Development Program told the Associated Press yesterday.

This article describes how developing countries will need tens of billions of dollars each year to cope with the effects of climate change. As the world's leaders prepare to meet in Copenhagen later this week, we hope they are hearing this message.

That climate change is affecting the developing world is a fact our farmers in Kenya know only too well. Rainfall has become scarcer and scarcer in this part of the world, which already needs every drop. Over the last ten years rain has become less and less reliable, pushing our farmers deeper into poverty. The Nyeri area where our farmers operate only had 58 percent of its usual rainfall last year, according to the Kenyan Meteorological Department. Coffee needs a lot of water to grow, and unreliable rainfall prevents these farmers from achieving sustainability.

As part of our fundraising efforts to help impoverished Kenyan farmers, Rural Development Connections is offering charitable gifts this holiday season, that will buy tools and items that will help make them more efficient farmers.

Water as always is key to their success as farmers, and our charitable gifts include drip irrigation - which at $75 for a one-acre farm is far cheaper than $1,000 an acre for a conventional system - and a family's share of a community well, which will provide them with clean drinking water as well as water to irrigate their farm with.

For more information and to purchase an Outside the Box Gift from Rural Development Connection visit www.ruraldevelopmentconnections.org

Outside the Gift Box

It’s that time of year again! The holiday season is upon us. Which means lots of pushing and shoving at the mall, trying to find the perfect gifts for people that already have much of what they need.

This holiday season, why not consider a slightly different kind of gift? Rural Development Connections has a range of charitable gifts to offer, where every dollar you spend in your loved one’s name goes directly to needy Kenyan farmers. We’ll send you a card containing a picture of the gift and you can give that straight to your loved one. Click here to browse gifts!

You can choose to plant a tree, which will help reintroduce biodiversity and strengthen the soil, or buy a family’s share of a community well so they have clean water to drink and with which to irrigate their land. You could select new tools such as a wheelbarrow, hoe, machete or others to help make them more efficient farmers. Or you could purchase drip irrigation for a smallholder farmer, much cheaper than regular irrigation techniques, but just as effective. Buy a donkey to help a farming family transport fertilizer and crops (not at the same time obviously). There is also an option to buy local organic certification or fair trade certification to help farmers get more money for the crops they harvest. Or finally our favorite – enough cow dung to fertilize a farm for four months. This is particularly needed by the farmers as years of deforestation and poor agricultural policy have left the soil weak.

All of these items are desperately needed by the farmers in the Rural Development Connections program, which aims to provide them with the tools and the knowledge to sell their crops on the global market and move themselves higher up the value chain.

Unlike many charitable gift schemes, Rural Development Connections can guarantee that every single penny spent will go towards the gift selected. No admin fees, no siphoning off here or there, and no putting it into a larger pot for us to decide later how it is best spent. That means that if you want to buy a donkey in your best friend’s name, then a donkey is what will be purchased.

This cuts to the heart of our commitment to being Safi at all times – Safi means honest and transparent in Swahili.

The only time we do reserve the right to reallocate funds is if orders are received for an excessive amount of one particular type of gift. For example, if we receive orders for 700 donkeys and there is only a need for say, 60, we will fill the need first and then use the remaining funds to purchase the other much needed items. We hope this is understandable.

Thank you for considering a Rural Development Connections Out of the Box gift, and happy holidays!!

The Rural Development Connections team.

P.S. For more information on Rural Development Connections, the Coffee Connections project, or Safi Coffee, please see the following links:
www.coffeeconnect.org
www.ruraldevelopmentconnect.org
www.saficoffee.com

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Rotaract Halloween Party Supports Rural Development Connections

SAN FRANCISCO, October 19th, 2009¬—Rural Development Connections, a local non-profit organization which promotes fair trade and direct market access for coffee farmers in Kenya, today announced that the fifth annual Rotaract Halloween party will donate part of its proceeds from ticket sales to Rural Development Connections. The event takes place at the Novato Horseman’s Club, Novato, California on Saturday October 31st. Tickets to the event are $35, and doors open at 7.00pm.

Rural Development Connections is a non-profit, non-sectarian organization dedicated to the livelihood of small African farmers and assisting in moving their crops higher up the value chain. It accomplishes its goals by supporting the improvement of the quality and quantity of crops cultivated, further developing the value chain in agri-business and contributing to stabilizing children’s complete education in rural communities. Rural Development Connections is run by Bay Area native, Shannon Mulholland.

“We are very excited that Rotaract has chosen to support Rural Development Connections in this year’s party. Rotaract really knows how to put on a great event and does fantastic work supporting local charities in the process. We are really pleased to have been selected,” says Shannon Mulholland, Executive Director of Rural Development Connections.

Growing up in the City of San Francisco and Marin County, Shannon has always been passionate about buying from farmers’ markets and supporting local organic farming methods. Through her career in international development, she has seen firsthand how African smallholder farmers are often marginalized and impoverished due to a lack of direct market access. Many Kenyan coffee farmers earn less than $0.02 for producing a bag of coffee that retails in the US at $12. Last year the average Kenyan farmer made just $14 in coffee sales—for the entire year.

With this in mind, Shannon launched Rural Development Connections in 2008. Rural Development Connections’ largest project is the Coffee Connections Project, which provides international direct market access for African coffee farmers. This project partners Rural Development Connections with Safi Coffee, an African farmer-owned, fair-trade coffee company based in San Francisco. Safi Coffee will launch its Farmer Direct coffee in January 2010, through local Bay Area schools.

For more information, contact:Shannon Mulholland, info@ruraldevelopmentconnections.org or to buy tickets http://www.rotaracthalloween.org/

Rotaract Novato
Rotaract Novato is a branch of Rotary International that is comprised of young professionals and students who are committed to making an impact in the community through service, non-profit collaboration and networking events. Rotaract fosters leadership and responsibility, encourages high ethical standards and promotes diversity, international understanding and peace. To learn more visit http://www.novatorotaract.org/.

Rural Development Connections
Founded in 2008, Rural Development Connection's mission is to provide rural income generation opportunities to small scale farmers, discourage negative urbanization in sub-saharan Africa, and to encourage the completion of education of rural inhabitants. For more information visit http://www.ruraldevelopmentconnections.org/

Safi Coffee
Safi Coffee is a farmer-owned, fair-trade company, providing direct market access to African coffee farmers. Safi Coffee sells coffee Farmer-Direct in order for farmers to earn incomes as equity owners of their own company rather than from the bottom rungs of the supply chain. For more information visit http://www.saficoffee.com/

A Tree Planting Project: Environmentally Sustaining Smallholder Farming

Many of the Kenyan farmers that work through with Rural Development Connections (RDC) have cut down the trees over the years to make charcoal. For a farming family in Rural Kenya, charcoal is used as the predominant fuel for cooking and heating one’s home. In the past trees are not seen as a thing of natural beauty, yet as a means of survival. However, by cutting down so many trees biodiversity, soil strength and crop health on the farms have been compromised. The trees used to provide a shade canopy over the coffee trees, ensuring that they did not burn form the harsh rays of the equatorial sun. In addition by cutting down indigenous old growth trees, the farmers inadvertently have contributed to global warming by destroying some of the natural forests that offset human carbon dioxide pollution.

RDC is launching a Tree Planting Project as part of its sustainable farming program to counteract the environmental damage done. RDC’s aims to plant 500 indigenous and tropical trees in a farming community outside of Nyeri Town, Central Province, Kenya. The trees planted -- such as the indigenous Wild Fig that has deep roots able to pierce bedrock, bringing water to surface -- are expected to assist in encouraging the reintroduction of biodiversity on the farms, strengthen the soil and prevent mineral loss and erosion and provide the much needed shade of coffee trees.

RDC will develop a tress sapling nursery where young trees can be raised by the farming community until old enough to be planted into the farms. Each farmer will be responsible for the trees on his/her own farm and be expected to care for it through the years to come. As significant way of enticing the farmers to care for their trees and not cut them down in the future, RDC will teach the farmers the benefits of environmental farming in the Farmer Education Resource Center and look to trade carbon credits of the trees through the international markets as an alternative income.

During recent years the international community has become more concerned with global warming and the affects tress can have in offsetting Carbon Dioxide emissions from pollution. According to the most recent Economist, Carbon Credits are trading for approximately 30USD a ton. RDC farmer beneficiaries have a median of 100 coffee trees per farm, which may sequester roughly .5 tons of CO2 a year[1]. While coffee trees are often pruned to around six feet for ease of harvest and have a narrow trunk diameter (defining the CO2 sequestration rate) other taller trees with wider trunks such as many indigenous trees sequester heavier amounts of CO2. By planting indigenous trees, RDC hopes to increase each farmed acre CO2 sequestration rate to minimum of 2 tons a year and in the future trade these carbon credits on the international market on behalf of the farmers.

To donate funds to support Rural Development Connection’s Tree Planting Project see or for more information please contact Shannon Mulholland at info@ruraldevelopmentconnections.org

[1] The CO2 sequester calculation completed using an algorithm developed by research by Trees for the Future: http://www.treesftf.org/

5th Annual Novato Rotaract Halloween Bash: 31 October

For any of you in the San Francisco Bay Area that do not yet have plans for Halloween, but want to have some fun...why not come to the 5th Annual Novato Rotaract Halloween Bash?

Come dance and drink all night long with the rest us and you can know that funds raised by the party go towards our Kenyan programs! Dress in your best costume to The Novato Horsemen's Club.

Doors open at 7PM

Tickets $35

For more information: http://rotaracthalloween.org/

From the Ground Up: Composting with Coffee

Applying used coffee grounds to your garden as a soil ammendment or compost pile can be a great a source of nutrition to help your flowers grow.

Used coffee grounds are a perfect addition to compost or flowerbeds because:
1. They hold moisture.
2. They are free and unlike many over the counter products, they smell good and are not toxic if inhaled (as some inorganic fertilzers).
3. They contain Nitrogen-Phosphate-Potassium (N-P-K) and other trace elements.
4. They can deter slugs
5. They add acidity to the soil.

How to apply used coffee grounds in your garden: You can place the coffee ground directly on the top of your soil. Plants that like a lot of acid such as hydrangeas and azaleas will love you. Keeping in mind that you don’t want to add too much acid, you should balance the coffee grounds with the paper coffee filter (!!), dried leaves, chipped bark or shreaded cardboard (bowns) to ensure you keep the soil pH balanced.

How to utlize used coffee grounds in your composter:Since Coffee is high in nitrogen they act as a green material (rather than brown) when decomposing in your composter. Make sure to layer the coffee grounds (and other green materials) with browns (such as the used coffee filter (!!), dried leaves, dried grasses, chipped bark, or shreaded cardboard/paper). This layering affect will help speed up the decompotion process and if you have a vermicomposter (worm composting) ensure that you do no encourage fruit flies or other pests while providing the wiggly wigglers with “bedding”.

Coffee grounds will hold the mositiure to encourge decompostion and when correctly combined with enough browns they will generate heat. Keep in mind that there is too much of a good thing (even coffee) so don’t pile too much coffee into your composter and balance the grounds with other kicthen scraps (fruit peels, egg shells, vegetable cuttings, etc…) To ensure to not imbalance your composters pH too much you may want to through in a little lime, wood ash or baking soda. 1-2 spoons for every few lbs of coffee should e sufficent. This will also help if you have a vermicomposter to ensure the worms don’t get burnt from too much acid.

For more information on composting please see: www.vermicomposters.com or talk to your local organic gardening shop.

Organic Farming Training Commences

Last week the farmers started their first course in a forty hour intensive organic farming training course. The farmers are by default farming organic, but they do not understand the intrinsic value of such practices...yet! To date many have used cow manure to fertilizer their crops but not believing it was as good as the blue stuff that comes in a bag. They understand that they need to control the pests but questioned if there was another way to a chemical that makes their skin peal off (no, I'm not kidding!) when they administer it through a pump spray can on their backs.

With the farmers' interest in learning new (and cheap!!) ways of farming, our on the ground partnership with Green Dreams Ltd and through the financial sponsorship of MamaHope, Rural Development Connections is facilitating organic trainings to teach the farmers valuable knowledge. Modules include What does organic mean?, Why is organic produce worth more money?, How do I farm organically?, How do I compost and what are the benefits?, and How to cultivate earthworms and why.

This is the beginning of having the farms certified organic by the East African Organic Association, which will in turn not only provide lasting environmental affects on the land, but allow the farmers to sell the produce at 25-100% premiums in comparison to "regular" produce.

We are on the road to self-sustainability!

To see more photos please log onto our facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/pages/Coffee-Connections/56441116902