The second meaning has to do with how foods are grown.  Just because a food is nutritional-packed does not always mean it’s healthy.  Some fruits and vegetables with high nutritional density may be unhealthy because of how they were grown.  Toxic pesticide contamination is the main reason foods that normally have high nutritional value may actually be unhealthy.  According to the Environmental Working Group these are the “Dirty Dozen” foods with the highest pesticide residues:

Peaches, Apples, Sweet Bell Peppers, Celery, Nectarines, Strawberries, Cherries, Pears, Grapes (Imported), Spinach, Lettuce, Potatoes

These nutrient dense foods can be far healthier if we eat them WITHOUT the added poisons.  How do we find these 12 crops without pesticide residues?   By buying them from organic sources (and the more local the source the more nutritional value, usually). OR, by growing them at home.  Half of these “Dirty Dozen” are perfect candidates to grow in Kitchen Gardens, raised beds and containers where you control how they are grown.

This tomato seedling is surrounded by our "magic spinach". 

But how can families in developing countries gain access to more nutritious food?  Many traditional farmers markets in poorer countries still provide access to good food from local farms but more pesticides are creeping into these once-organic farms.  And for many families cheap calories (corn, rice, beans, sugar) are all they can afford.  So for them growing kitchen gardens (and orchards) makes great sense.

Restoring Our Watershed, a non-profit I founded in Costa Rica, is starting a nutrient dense community organic gardening project at Paraiso’s Centro de Nutrición (Nutrition Center, or CEN). The CEN is part of a national government program to provide young mothers and their children with food and milk. For this project, we are helping a women’s group to plan and maintain a nutritious garden, providing 75% of the produce for the CEN and 25% for their own use at home.  The goal is to provide a wider range of vegetables to the CEN’s lunch program, improving the diet of participating children and availability of local food. Ultimately, we hope that mothers will begin new gardens at home, and we will help.

What will be grown at the CEN garden raised beds?  90% will be familiar healthy foods that are already appreciated including beans, cherry tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, eggplant, plus taro, nyami, jicama, and chayote.  Also, we'll have banana, cuadrado, and plantain trees.  But we also want to introduce some new foods that can both grow well in the wet/dry, windy/hot climate of Guanacaste.  Our focus will be campote (sweet potatoes) and a new-to-us variety of spinach we just discovered that is easy to grow, pest and disease resistant, drought and flood tolerant, plus nutritious and flavorful raw or cooked.

Perennial spinach growing in intensive raised bed 

We found this ‘miracle’ green in the Costa Rica “Sacred Seed Garden” and hope to introduce it to the US in 2014 to expand nutrition-packed kitchen gardens here.  Only problem is this perennial spinach seems to grow only from cuttings and not seeds.  Good that we all have overnight delivery in the US!

Gardeners know that good pollination makes for better crops of tomatoes, cucumbers, apples and raspberries.  European honey bees come to mind as the most important pollinator.  And that is especially true for certain commercial crops like almonds that need to have 1 million honey bee hives brought to California’s Central Valley to provide pollination for 60 million trees (supporting 80% of the world’s almond production).  But wild bees, beetles, flies, butterflies, moths, birds and bats also are critical in moving pollen from the male to the female parts of flowers for fruit and seed setting.

This point was affirmed last month in a massive international study of 600 sites in 20 countries involving 41 crops published in Science. It found that wild insects are more important than we may have thought for crop pollination and that honey bees cannot replace the value and importance of wild pollinators.  Science reported, “wild insects pollinated crops more effectively, because an increase in their visitation enhanced fruit set by twice as much as an equivalent increase in honey bee visitation. Further, visitation by wild insects and honey bees promoted fruit set independently, so high abundance of managed honey bees supplemented, rather than substituted for, pollination by wild insects.”

So our gardens and farms need BOTH wild insect and honey bee pollinators.

Nearly 20 years ago I read that Albert Einstein (the physicist, rather than the entomologist, but still a deep thinker about global issues) said to the National Union of French Apiculture, "if the bee disappears off the surface of the earth, man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."  I don’t know if he was thinking about wild bees or cultivated honey bee or both.  This new research indicates the answer is both. The study reported in Science shows the pollinator services provided by wild insects can add to the pollinating power of honey bees.  In fact, both wild insects and honey bees are needed to maximize crop production, and the ongoing decline of wild insects due to habitat loss, whether from land conversion to farms or suburbs, will reduce harvests as Einstein warned.

What can be done?  Wild pollinators usually live in natural habitats, such as the edges of forests, riparian zones, hedgerows or grasslands. Gardener’s Supply has always promoted “less lawn and more gardens”, pollinator-friendly organic pesticides and creating homes for beneficial insects.  Agriculture can also help promote nature’s pollinator services with practices that conserve or restore natural areas around and within croplands, add diverse flowering plants, provide nesting areas, and minimize pesticide use.  The Science article concluded that without steps to conserve wild pollinators, “the ongoing loss of wild insects is destined to compromise agricultural yields worldwide”.

What else can be done? Please donate to the Bees for Trees project I am proud to be a part of. Your contribution will help the bees, the trees, rural families learning an important trade, AND the “Earth’s” garden.  And you get free honey, a tax break and a great deal on your next order at Gardener's Supply. For details and to donate, please see below:

(*With apologies to the Troggs and their 1966 best selling song “Wild Thing”)

KEEPING THE BUZZ FOR THE BEES – NEW HIVE DESIGN COULD CHANGE BEEKEEPING IN THE TROPICS 

by Matt Rosensteele

Executive Director of www.ourwatershed.org

Pure, raw honey could transform the Nandamojo river basin on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast. Our organization, Restoring Our Watershed (ROW), gives small loans for honey production through our Bees for Trees program.  The project is proving to be successful in the most important ways.

Bees for Trees enables us to create green jobs and keep families on their farms, reforest priority areas for the watershed’s health, and help fund our overhead by selling a product that is good for people. We also help people become beekeepers, establishing more homes for millions of pollinators and enhancing the forest ecosystem in our valley.

As we scale up the initiative, we are looking for advice from all perspectives on an important issue: should we “not fix what isn’t broken” and stay with the commonly-used Langstroth hives? Or should we expand technologies available to local beekeepers, try something new, and give Top-Bar hives a try? 

Bees for Trees was designed in response to historical, economic and ecological challenges the Nandamojo valley faces. The watershed was devastated by rapid deforestation to create cattle pastures during the 1950s, sixties, and seventies. The beef industry in the region later declined, and in the last twenty years tourism and foreign investment (through construction) became important components of the area’s prosperity.

The international financial crisis greatly reduced those sectors, and neither have fully recovered. This has created severe economic stagnation in the area. Families are hardly able to make a living, let alone invest in sustainable land use changes that are necessary to renew our watershed hydrology. Through beekeeping, we have found a powerful opportunity for the valley and are hoping to create a “honey economy” where ranching and tourism are no longer providing enough jobs.

Families who participate in Bees for Trees are given enough capital to begin producing honey from ten Langstroth hives (about $3000). In exchange for their new livelihood, they reforest the 5-10% of their farm which is most important to watershed health, such as a spring or stream buffer zone. They must also agree to stop using herbicides and pesticides.

ROW supplies new beekeepers with a mix of native species trees to complete the reforestation as well as training in natural honey production. When harvest time comes, we pay a fair price for their honey. After calculating its value, we allow the producers to take up to half the honey income in cash, applying the rest to their loan balance until it has been paid.  Then, they become full owners of their new honey enterprise and benefit from 100% of its income.

The Langstroth hive has served Bees for Trees producers well so far. We will have 70 by the end of the year. Our source for hives and training uses Lanstroths (the familiar vertical stacked frames for honey combs), and as a result, all of our producers are using them too.

The hives yield substantial amounts of honey – a typical family is able to repay their entire loan within two to three years, meaning a “return on investment” of at least 33% annually. Our first producer serves as a kind of “manager,” as he owns an extractor and has received thorough training. We hire him to help other families on harvest days, and he transports his extractor to their farm. His home serves as our bottling facility and the “warehouse” where ROW purchases honey from several producers.

Perhaps most exciting is the economic return for the participating families.  With just two to four weeks of labor every year, they are able to increase their household income by the equivalent of four to six months.

Top-Bar hives, on the other hand, could be an ideal fit for us to use in expanding our network of producers. They can be more inexpensive and easier to construct than the Langstroth design using local waste wood, which would help expand the program faster with less capital.

It seems Top-Bars do not require an extractor in order to harvest honey, which would eliminate the cost of paying Jaime to work with other families during harvests. Producers, however, would probably have to spend more time on harvesting honey with top bars, as the process can be slower.

The research we have done also suggests that Top-Bar horizontal hives can be easier to maintain and produce more sellable bees wax. That would reduce the costs associated with training new Bees for Trees families plus increase income, and easily-understood technologies can be scaled up more easily than complex ones.

An exceptionally important factor (given the nature of our work) is that the Langstroth hive design is the only one used in Guanacaste beekeeping. We have not yet found one beekeeper in our area that uses Top-Bars. The wealth of information available on beekeeping indicates that it may be worth a try to popularize thus new technology, and we want to probe this possibility.

We want to find out whether or not the top bar hive could revolutionize beekeeping in Guanacaste. ROW needs capital to test the Top-Bar design and see how they compare to Langstroths, and we have launched a crowdsourced fundraising campaign to do so. Through Indiegogo.com, we are trying to raise $7,600 to advance Bees for Trees – please click here to contribute.
 
With those funds, we will conduct a comparative trial of the two designs, report on our results and decide which design to use for Bees for Trees. We will also be able to give two more loans, start two more families producing sustainabl income and reforest another 7.5 acres of our valley if our funding goal is reached.

What do you think? Beekeepers of all stripes are invited to comment!

“I made my own tincture (incredibly easy —cover the ripe berries with 80-100 proof alcohol and steep and shake occasionally; in 6 weeks it’s done!).  Could it be true that elderberry tincture taken at the first signs of a cold had the power to banish the virus?  In my experience, and now in that of countless friend’s experience (I cannot help but share what I learn) it does in fact work for colds, flu and other viral attacks as well!”

Elderberry extract, juice and wine have been used traditionally to support the immune system, especially during the winter season or when experiencing extra stress. We make a gallon or so of extract every year and then whenever we feel those logy early symptoms of a cold we down a teaspoon of the elderberry goodness every few hours and almost invariably we stop the cold virus or head off the full impact.  Elderberry is our magical cold remedy.

Lynette did some more research and discovered that elderberry extract made from black elderberries in fact is effective with flu viruses as well as colds.

Maybe that’s why we have not had the flu for 2 decades!  Now we start every flu season with our elderberry extract decanter full of elixir.  Research indicates elderberry extract minimizes negative effects of cold and flu viruses, but our experience is that it can stop colds and prevent the flu altogether.  Powerful stuff free from nature! 

In 2000 I bought 300 bare root elderberry bushes, potted them up and grew them out for the summer.  Then I gave them to Gardener’s Supply employees (with Lynette’s recipe) to plant (with Lynette’s recipe) so they could have their own cold and flu remedy garden.  What a surprise this Christmas when George Bedrin gave me two bottles of his “Bedrin Bino” elderberry wine the week he retired from Gardener’s Supply with this note: 

“Remember when you procured elderberry plants for us? I planted 3 bushes on the south property line. I generally get 5–10 gallons of berries on the stem – earwigs included!  I clean and de-stem them to produce 6 gallons of wine from 7 lbs of berries per gallon.

They are now bottled as Bedrin Bino (vino). This year’s elderberry wine is the best so far. You have a bottle of that and a bottle of last year’s elderberry port to enjoy. Thanks for providing a great opportunity for gardeners around the world. It has been my pleasure to work for GSC.”

And indeed, this was amazingly good wine!  Much easier to down than the extract.  Now, I wonder if the elderberry wine conquers those cold and flu iviruses as well as the extract?

PS.  My new magic garden remedy is flor de Jamaica and I’m about to plant 1000 bushes.

 
Our planet’s rapidly warming climate was a factor in all of these disturbing events. Though it had been almost 40 years since I participated in a mass protest, I felt I had to act. I went to Washington to join the largest environmental protest in US history and was arrested at the White House, along with 800 others, for opposing the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. If constructed, this pipeline would provide access to the second largest pool of carbon on earth, opening the tar sands of northern Canada to U.S. markets. Extracting oil from these tar sands would severely degrade both the land and our atmosphere. Renowned NASA climate scientist James Hansen has said, if we harvest and burn this carbon it is essentially “game over” for the planet in terms of controlling global warming.
 
As twenty of us were loaded into a Metropolitan Police paddy wagon on that hot DC day, I sat shoulder to shoulder with other gardeners and nature lovers, parents and grandparents. All of us had felt the same call to action.
 
Why should gardeners care about climate change? After all, some might argue that places like Vermont will benefit from longer growing seasons. Already, our lilacs are blooming almost a month earlier than when I moved here 32 years ago. But a longer growing season has brought new challenges: devastating storms like Irene, regional droughts and new water restrictions, destructive diseases, damaging garden pests (deer ticks for people and invasive fruit flies for plants), and new super weeds (like kudzu in the south and Japanese knotweed in the north) that are choking out habitats for native plants.

Each year, my wife Lynette lets hundreds of milkweed plants self-seed in our gardens to help monarch butterflies feed and breed. In recent years, many summer wildflowers, including milkweed, have bloomed too early for the monarchs. As gardeners, we are deeply connected to the natural world and can see the impacts of climate change on the people, plants and wildlife that we cherish. Good gardens can help strengthen biodiversity and guide us to a more sustainable future.

  Please let me know about any climate-related garden problems – and solutions – that you have encountered in recent years so I can share them with other gardeners in coming   months.
  

“For 35 years, Will and I have called Vermont home and have accepted the seasonality of gardening under northern climate conditions. Five years ago, we became official “snowbirds” and began to also sink roots in the country of my maternal ancestors: Costa Rica. With this change came new joys, opportunities and challenges of gardening in the tropics. Even though the ambient temperature seems hospitable to year round gardening, there are many other factors in play that dictate a seasonal aspect to gardening there as well! With drip irrigation, shade structures (natural shade from high trees and constructed from durable shade cloth), and some wind protection, it is possible to enjoy many of the veggies that thrive in Vermont, such as tomatoes, peppers (of every color and heat), eggplants, cucumbers, summer and winter squash and some herbs.
 
What is new and exciting for us are the plants that serve as replacements for the greens that prefer cooler temps. Malabar and New Zealand spinach, and the leaves from nutritionally superior quelite and ketuk shrubs replace spinach and lettuce in salads, soups and green drinks. Purslane, a common, tasty and highly undervalued weed in both climates, grows with abandon in poor soils. Omega 3’s are rarely found in the plant world but purslane is loaded with them. The nutrient-dense moringa tree (which hails from Africa where it is being credited for saving countless lives) is thriving in Guanacaste. Its foliage has a high protein and mineral content and it offers every required enzyme (a rarity in the plant world). By “stumping” (heavily pruning) the moringa tree, it can be kept short and will produce a continuous profusion of new growth. Lightly steamed, these tips are dead ringers in flavor for asparagus!
 
Aloe Vera, another superfood, grows willingly along the roadsides. Applied topically, the gel is famous for the benefits it imparts to the skin. But did you know that the gel is also an unequalled healer of the digestive tract? Noni – the stinky fruit – is yet another superfood that we ingest daily. I can’t say I love the flavor…but dehydrated and powdered I can hide it in fresh juices so we can reap the benefits of its anti-oxidant and cell renewing action.
 
The list of tropical fruits that we grow or have access to is astonishing. In addition to muskmelons and watermelons, we eat papaya, pineapple, mango, bananas, citrus and guanabana, and there are nearly 100 others fruits that I’m aware of in the region that range anywhere from “interesting” to “delectable” in flavor, while offering yet more remarkable nutritional benefits.
 
Gardening in Costa Rica poses daunting challenges for those who restrict themselves to growing typical North American plants. But I am discovering that the tropics offer a treasure trove of wild and cultivated vegetables, fruits and herbs. I can’t imagine ever losing interest in the fun of exploring these foods.”

I have convinced my partners in www.tierrapacifica.com, a conservation and gardening community, to offer a free Costa Rica vacation so lucky Gardener’s Supply customers can win a trip this winter to visit where we garden. Lynette and I will be your tour guides for discovering and eating some delectable tropical super foods. Click here to learn how you could Win a Free Costa Rica Beach Vacation!
 

Our work is now being done through a registered US non-profit organization called Restoring Our Watershed. We are discovering that nearly 300 bird species use our river valley to rest, feed and nest and that poor land use practices, often caused by economic stress, have substantially reduced the health of their habitat. So we decided to act. We developed microloan programs to help small landowners diversify their income.Then we married that with government supported tree planting to restore forest cover and Bees for Trees was born. Please check it out: How a “Honey Economy” Can Restore A River, Habitat and Livelihoods .

If you’d like to visit the Nandamojo Valley and learn more about our new “honey economy” and the birds that call our watershed home consider entering this contest.

In recent years, Vermont has also created the most growth per capital in jobs related to the ‘green economy’, including energy efficiency, renewable energy, waste management, water and land conservation…and sustainable agriculture. This success in ‘green job’ creation results from conscious efforts to build sustainability into statewide policies for energy, food, the environment and land development. As our world's natural resources (water, soil, fossil fuels, predictable climate, etc.) become more limited, such policies should enhance Vermont's competitive economic advantage.

Changes in our country's food system show how this advantage can work. For the first time in 90 years the number of farms in the U.S. is increasing. The demand for locally grown, healthier, fresher and better-tasting food grown with fewer pesticides, herbicides and genetically modified ingredients is a key factor in the success of family farms that are serving markets where they are located. In Vermont, the number of new diversified farms has been growing for years even as we continue to lose dairy farms.

Last week, the New York Times reported that jobs created by this resurgence in local agriculture are attracting some of the best and brightest recent college graduates, who are eager to make farming their career. The need for more jobs in “new agriculture” and the opportunity to make a living doing something you love, producing products the world needs, has never been greater. By the middle of this century our world will need to grow more food than has been produced by farmers, foragers and gardeners over the past 8,000 years!  It’s good news indeed that young people are interested in returning to farming.

In Vermont, interest in farming careers among young job-seekers has been growing for more than two decades. That’s a big reason Vermont now leads the nation in direct-to-consumer farmer sales, aided by the State’s high ratio of farmers’ markets and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) membership farms. This year our State was also ranked #1 in the nation for availability of local food. Of course, having a high proportion of households growing food in family gardens helps support these statistics! This impressive national ranking also demonstrates the power of Vermont's strong commitment to farmland protection and new farm business development and incubation.

When I helped to start the Intervale Center 25 years ago, our goal was to create a catalyst for organic urban agriculture and food system change. At that time, Vermont farms were producing less than 1% of the calories we consumed. Today we are approaching 5%, and there’s a statewide plan to reach 10% by 2022. Now the opportunity is to help suburban areas join the local food revolution by establishing farms, CSAs, and farmers markets near tract homes, malls and freeways. This is the new local farming frontier, and we will need loads of next-generation farmers as pioneers.*

*Over the past 4 years, I have been developing an organic farm that's part of a new suburban development on a 220 acre failed dairy farm. Here’s a link to a current job opening for a Community Farm Manager. 

The Farm at South Village

“For 35 years, Will and I have called Vermont home and have accepted the seasonality of gardening under northern climate conditions. Five years ago, we became official “snowbirds” and began to also sink roots in the country of my maternal ancestors: Costa Rica. With this change came new joys, opportunities and challenges of gardening in the tropics. Even though the ambient temperature seems hospitable to year round gardening, there are many other factors in play that dictate a seasonal aspect to gardening there as well! With drip irrigation, shade structures (natural shade from high trees and constructed from durable shade cloth), and some wind protection, it is possible to enjoy many of the veggies that thrive in Vermont, such as tomatoes, peppers (of every color and heat), eggplants, cucumbers, summer and winter squash and some herbs.
 
What is new and exciting for us are the plants that serve as replacements for the greens that prefer cooler temps. Malabar and New Zealand spinach, and the leaves from nutritionally superior quelite and ketuk shrubs replace spinach and lettuce in salads, soups and green drinks. Purslane, a common, tasty and highly undervalued weed in both climates, grows with abandon in poor soils. Omega 3’s are rarely found in the plant world but purslane is loaded with them. The nutrient-dense moringa tree (which hails from Africa where it is being credited for saving countless lives) is thriving in Guanacaste. Its foliage has a high protein and mineral content and it offers every required enzyme (a rarity in the plant world). By “stumping” (heavily pruning) the moringa tree, it can be kept short and will produce a continuous profusion of new growth. Lightly steamed, these tips are dead ringers in flavor for asparagus!
 
Aloe Vera, another superfood, grows willingly along the roadsides. Applied topically, the gel is famous for the benefits it imparts to the skin. But did you know that the gel is also an unequalled healer of the digestive tract? Noni – the stinky fruit – is yet another superfood that we ingest daily. I can’t say I love the flavor…but dehydrated and powdered I can hide it in fresh juices so we can reap the benefits of its anti-oxidant and cell renewing action.
 
The list of tropical fruits that we grow or have access to is astonishing. In addition to muskmelons and watermelons, we eat papaya, pineapple, mango, bananas, citrus and guanabana, and there are nearly 100 others fruits that I’m aware of in the region that range anywhere from “interesting” to “delectable” in flavor, while offering yet more remarkable nutritional benefits.
 
Gardening in Costa Rica poses daunting challenges for those who restrict themselves to growing typical North American plants. But I am discovering that the tropics offer a treasure trove of wild and cultivated vegetables, fruits and herbs. I can’t imagine ever losing interest in the fun of exploring these foods.”

I have convinced my partners in www.tierrapacifica.com, a conservation and gardening community, to offer a free Costa Rica vacation so lucky Gardener’s Supply customers can win a trip this winter to visit where we garden. Lynette and I will be your tour guides for discovering and eating some delectable tropical super foods. Click here to learn how you could Win a Free Costa Rica Beach Vacation!
 

For most of my life, I have been observing the shift from family farms and local food production to centralized, industrialized agriculture fueled by cheap oil and federal subsidies. I started Gardener's Supply and the Intervale Center thirty years ago to form beachheads in my hometown and in backyards across America that proclaimed “local, organic food grown here.” It is encouraging to see that finally, real progress is being made. The amount of local food being grown with sustainable practices is now increasing faster than the amount of food produced on industrial-scale farms thousands of miles from dinner tables.

 But, with current population trends and increasing prosperity in developing countries, our world will need to produce more food in the next 40 years than was produced during the last 8,000 years. WHAT A CHALLENGE, even without the rising cost of petro-chemicals, the foundation of our current food system’s productivity. As leading environmentalists warn, we need to do everything we can to restore current agricultural land and make it more productive, because simply converting more of nature to farmland would further collapse biodiversity, stress aquifers, deplete topsoil and accelerate greenhouse gas emissions. YET, what an opportunity we have to boost local food production and deploy millions of underemployed and unemployed workers in new “green jobs” growing, processing and distributing food, generating clean renewable energy, recycling wastes into assets and restoring degraded ecosystems.

Five years ago I decided to get more personally involved in this new local food economy by starting two small farms, one in Vermont and one in Costa Rica. Both are associated with new communities that help host the farms and serve as initial markets for the food. The Vermont farm is Farm at South Village and with multiple part-time and full-time farmers we are now operating a 60 member CSA, producing greenhouse vegetables and wholesale root crops, meat chickens and turkeys, plus eggs and honey. Part of our 3 year plan is to create a “food hub” that will aggregate food produced on dozens of area farms and make it available for families in the surrounding suburban “food desert.”

Finca Mi Tierra in Costa Rica is part of Tierra Pacifica. While this farm grows and distributes local food, it also is developing a brand that aims to grow local jobs and improve degraded lands in association with a local non-profit organization, Restoring Our Watershed. The Mi Tierra “mother farm” at Tierra Pacifica produces organic fruits, vegetables and conservation plants. Plus, it does research and testing for soil fertility, seed varieties, intensive production techniques and pest control (monkeys, iguanas and a 6 ft croc have been big challenges this year).

The Mi Tierra demonstration farm has also become a catalyst for a network of new local farms that are supported by an innovative micro-lending program with a focus on creating land-based jobs and invigorating sustainable economic activity. The first loans were made to a honey cooperative and an egg producer, and organic honey and eggs are now available throughout the area. Honey production is going so well that the third loan is supporting expanded honey production and distribution (more than 50% of Costa Rica’s honey is imported so there is plenty of opportunity). The fourth loan is supporting a small family vegetable farm in their transition to organic production. This will double the supply of organic produce currently distributed under the Mi Tierra brand (including cucumbers, peppers, squash, green beans and tomatoes).

Working with Restoring Our Watershed, MiTierra is building on these successes, and expanding the micro-loan funds to support the production of a variety of local, sustainable products, including organic fruit, rice, goat cheese and yogurt, tilapia, and coconut oil. The Mi Tierra network of farms and local food hub is creating jobs and changing a local economy.