Remember the magic beans… at What’s Organic

…because they may be a real answer, when used along with other techniques of sustainable agriculture.

“Sustainable agriculture is not a concretely defined set of technologies, nor is it a simple model or package. It needs to be conceived of as a process for social learning.” –Jules Pretty

Farmers in Central America can and do use magic beans: in this case the velvet bean, or Mucuna pruriens, in a technique promoted by several Honduran and Guatemalan NGOs — including World Neighbors, COSECHA (The Association of Consultants for a Sustainable, Ecological and People-Centered Agriculture) and Centro Maya — when they found that farmers planting the bean between rows of maize were able to improve soil quality and substantially increase crop yields.

“Mucuna can fix into the soil 150 kilograms of nitrogen per hectare annually — a free, natural fertilizer for farmers.”

In 2003, Jules Pretty wrote brilliantly in the New Internationalist about the application of the mucuna bean and other techniques of sustainable agriculture in northern Guatemala, Honduras and other countries in Central America. His article titled PEASANTS’ REVOLT: The politics of food and farming - The magic bean, is part travel log, part research paper and part history lesson. As a follow-up, the World Neighbors page on Sustainable Agriculture shows a field in Guatamala before and after sustainable farming methodologies are applied.

For more on how small farmers are using sustainable agriculture techniques like the magic mucuna bean as a weapon against the factory-farming giants, read:

The New Agriculturalist on the mucuna bean
Farming Solutions - the Future of Agriculture on the magic mucuna
Mateo Canas and international agriculturalist Roland Bunch on Farmer Experimenters: The technologies they develop on their own

For more by Jules Pretty, Professor of Environment and Society at the University of Essex, his book, Agri-Culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature is published by Earthscan.