Ternyata banyak petani belum tahu cara mengetahui tingkat keasaman atau kebasaan dari tanah. Padahal ini penting sekali. Sebab kalau tidak, maka ada resiko tanaman jadi kurang tumbuh subur.
Mereka yang telah ahli tak perlu lagi membutuhkan kertas lakmus. Cukup memasukkan tangan ke dalam tanah, sudah ada yang tahu. Tapi yang belum pernah atau belum peka pada keasaman dan kebasaan barangkali berguna mencobanya dengan menggunakan kertas lakmus.
Di mana dibeli? Ya di toko kimia. Harganya? Bisa mahal juga ternyata. Apalagi tak bisa membeli hanya satu lembar saja. Lebih dari lima puluh ribu rupiah. Buatan RRCina. Yang buatan Jerman lebih mahal lagi. Tapi kalau beli bersama jadi murah.
Foto diambil dari sini.
2008-04-27
Kertas Lakmus
2008-04-10
Eggshell
We currently have a problem of how to get slaked lime in an enough amount for almost about 15,000 projected members of the Pasundan Farmers Association (SPP) in Ciamis district. Why only now? Because so far, as we were ignorant of organic farming, we have never used limestone to fill our tilled land to stabilize the pH of the soil. As a result our land is very acidic, made worse by the introduction of chemical fertilizers.
Java's land is generally known to have up to 5 to 4 pH scale. It is no good for plants to grow. People have mostly replaced limestone and compost with different chemical agricultural inputs.
It seems it is nowhere to find limestone. We have checked out several existing limestone minings like in Tasikmalaya district, W. Java, but to no avail. They have closed down in the last years. Unfortunate. May be for they lost under the hegemony of chemical inputs.
The limestones are there, however, and we have yet to find grinding machines considering that we need a quite large quantity and how to carry them to our land. Recycled machines would be best these days. Each hectare of tilled land would need about 400 kilos of ground limestone.
Limestone would definitely be more difficult to find in big towns or cities like Jakarta. Formerly people used burned limestone for construction that you may find it easy at neighboring building materials stores. But now they use more of cements and ignore limestone.
Our friends in Jakarta use eggshell to replace limestone. In fact, eggshell contains 97 percent of calcium carbonate that compost making needs. Where does he find quite amount of eggshell? Yes, they have if you ask ambulant vendors of fried rice in Jakarta. Ask them whenever they almost go home mostly after midnight.
Yet you have to grind them in advance. Stone mortar is good. Why not.
In addition, the eggshell still has protein like covering in the inside part. Supposedly it will enrich you compost. The explanation of Dr. Ken W. Koelkebeck of the Department of Animal Sciences, University of Illinois on eggshell is indeed very helpful to make us understand what is in eggshell.
You may also use eggshell to create mosaic. See what soopahgrover has made. Very cute.
We are not used to have such "large" land area in our mind
Applying the geotool of wikimapia, we are surprised that the area of our school may reach 13.570 hectares or 33.5 acres or 135702 meter square.
We are not used to have such "large" area in our mind, given that most of us were landless. We used to tell that the area is about five hectares. Hope it is not because of a mistake in measuring the area. We will soon check it out with direct field measuring activities.
After all, we are assigned to make this land productive. But so far nothing happens.
We hope with recent training on organic farming, farmers would have more energy to till their assigned land.
Many of us did not know how to properly cultivate plants. And that is why for so long we have ignored ways to treat well our plants. Most of them are actually in distress and in dire need to learn from the scratch. Why not?
A closer look to our school
View Larger Map
We are quite grateful to find that wikimapia and google map both include our location in that marvelous digital map. You will not, of course, get lost when you come to visit our school. Much would sooner be changed particularly the landscape.
Now we have started to create a new contour-wise terracering in order to keep the environment even better preserved. Hope it would finish sooner than later.
However, you will still have to take a much damaged access street/road to reach our location. The government has yet to finish as they complain to have no public budget to repair the road to quite comparatively remote areas like Pasawahan village.
2008-04-08
"Natural" agriculture for poor farmers
We are indeed very sorry for having been long absent in this blog. Now, we have just new drive yet to galvanize however that organic, let’s say, farming has caught our attention. Perhaps it is for the presumably "cost-less" agricultural system that attracts us to adopt. Dearth has pushed us to take such innovative agriculture that still promises us energy to work even harder, unless such zero input agriculture is doomed to fail.
We would like to say we do not care that much with the so-called “organic” agriculture. Because, mostly we could not immediately reach that level of cleanliness from all toxic substances that have infected our land. As you know many chemical fertilizers and pesticides are indeed still around among local farmers in our neighborhood. We saw them using and we could not say and do anything yet, unless we have done and showed a difference to them.
Hopefully they would follow us.
But we have not even started yet actually. But we have been given a marvellous training the other weekend on, let’s say, “natural agriculture”. We learn again, including those already elderly among us, how to make compost out of our abundant hays, grasses, reeds, banana trunks, etc. Please see our humble image beside. We feel embarrassed actually that we only learn it now.
Thanks to our enthusiastic teacher-facilitator with his unflagging spirit. Mas Tanto of Yogyakarta has taught us valuable lessons about how to grow local, indigenous rice varieties that would be suitable with agriculture activities with very low, even almost nothing of external inputs like those chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides.
We learn, in fact, that we have actually made our own land, not deliberately of course, much acidic so that different pests are attracted to approach and damage our plants. One of our teachers, who grows cacao, has found his hundreds of plants, died for leaf louses. He was helpless. It is a pity that we do not know about how to manage land into becoming neutral, not acid or basic, in addition to using our traditional kitchen’s ashes being sprayed on those miserable cacao plants.
Ever since, no one has taught us how to grow plants properly, even elementary principles, such as making compost. It is a pity. Indeed. Does it sound that we exaggerate? We actually just follow the way our parents or grand parents do.
The government appointed field officials for agriculture advice us, instead, to use those cursed chemical stuffs for agriculture, before they sell them to us and take our money. Is it not actually we do not have to pay? In fact, who would finance and “take benefit” from those big manufacturers like Pupuk Kujang, Pupuk Sriwijaya, ect., not to mention yet those imported.
Are we interested in paying them? No. No. Simply no way. Because even now they disguise such hegemony with offering subsidies of fertilizers. My goodness.
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