Sustainable Farming in Cuba: Reusing Becomes Necessity

I just finished reading Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls. It was a fantastic true life novel that painted a picture of no nonsense Lily Casey Smith who survived the Depression by working hard and pinching pennies like nobody's business. She wasted nothing, turning curtains into a dress and using magazine pages as toilet paper. Her true story outlines an America where saving, not consuming were the norm.

But since then our country has become consumer-driven and more and more deposable. But just south in Cuba you'll find a society that by necessity makes something out of nothing as Jerusha Klemperer documented on Civil Eats.

Here's an excerpt from her story:

[T]he discarded front grill to an old electric fan used as a hanging planter with just three chains and some burlap lining; liquid humus packaged in old Havana rum bottles and sold at a farm supply and consultation site; soda cans at an educational farm center cut to be planters for small succulents; an old cooking oil tin at a community garden turned sideways, sliced open, and planted with herbs; raised beds created with upturned spent liquor bottles; and a chicken coop on a family tobacco farm cobbled together from scrap wood and metal.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba was forced into a waste-free existence. Without fuel, food, or supplies they learned to farm without fertilizers in a sustainable manner because they had to in order to survive.

Klemperer reported that nearly everything in Cuba's society is based around saving.

Additionally, according to Organic Consumers, Cuba changed its techniques in the 1980's and as a result turned over a new leaf changing over almost entirely to organic farming within ten years.

Key ingredients in the new agricultural model are the urban agriculture movement; traditional farming techniques like composting and intercropping (growing two crops together that benefit each other by warding off particular pests); new nontoxic biopesticides and biofertilizers; worker-managed collectives; quotas for farmers to insure adequate supply for the whole country; and opening farmers' markets where excess food crops can be sold by farmers for profit

Even if we're not forced into this sort of a lifestyle maybe we can take a lesson from our Depression Era grandparents and remember how to live in a waste not want not society.

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