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Nadia Siles
Po-Hsun Lin
Rustom Meyer
Tuesday, 6 Jan 2009
Visited SANAA water treatment plant in Siguatepeque. It was like a poster for the need for appropriate technology. It was overall a good plant, but they wasted a great deal of potential energy, and used a lot of pumps at a high electricity cost. Also, one of their mechanical mixers was broken, and they had already waited like a month for a replacement (that was due to the plant being under warrantee by the builder as much as supply chain difficulties).
Later in the day we went to CEASO, and had lunch and a tour. At first I must admit I was not impressed. Their main room/dining hall/meeting room/environmental education center reminded me of nothing so much as a Boy Scout campground. But the real reason for visiting the place was not inside. On three acres of farmland, CEASO was pretty much self sufficient, and they used everything for something. Anything that one would normally think of as a byproduct or waste was turned into a resource. The kitchen and agricultural wastes were fed to penned animals (a cow, pigs, goats, and chickens). When their pens were washed, the animal waste went into a giant plastic bag, which functioned as an anaerobic digester. The methane generated in that bag was piped back into the kitchen for use on the stove. The digested liquid from the bag flowed out into a worm compost heap, which used that and more scraps to produce rich organic fertilizer. The whole farm had much richer soil than the surrounding lands.
The coffee was shade grown under nitrogen fixing trees and above nitrogen fixing ground cover, with the result that it produced as well as coffee plants that get artificial fertilizer twice a year. The citrus orchard also doubled as an area for more composting, and instead of insecticides, the owner just removed the fallen fruit (most of the fallen fruit had pests in it, and removing the fallen fruit interrupted the pest's life cycle), which he then fed to his chickens, for whom pest larvae were a good protein source. Speaking of which, he ground up the eggshells after using the eggs and put the eggshells back in the chicken's feed as a nutritional supplement to keep them in calcium. I get the feeling that there were a lot more little details of closed loops like that that we didn't even hear about.
Using a big ferrocement tank, rainwater, and a simple sand/charcoal filter, CEASO produced drinking water for the whole year during the rainy season. There was a similar setup minus the filters for irrigation water, and that tank doubled as an aquaculture tank for raising fish. All this plus bananas, beans, and other crops on three acres! Sadly, the CEASO produced fruit wine was terrible. I tried a little bit, and having done some home-brewing myself, I could identify lactic acid bacterial contamination. Also the containers weren't sealed, so the yeast had converted most of the alcohol to vinegar using the available oxygen. The bad wine was kind of grounding, as I was beginning to feel like I had dropped into some kind of ecological fantasy world. But no, CEASO is a real place, and like any real place, not everything is perfect.