Ayni, Regenerative Food Forest in the Amazon

Dear Friends and Supporters,

As you may remember, we have set ourselves the goal to have implemented 24 hectares of chacras integrales – diverse and productive agroforestry systems - in 4 of the surrounding communities of our permaculture center by the end of this year. The end of the year is approaching quickly, and our team is moving full steam to reach this goal.

We currently have 33 individuals that participate in our agroforestry work. They all have different sizes of land; altogether we work on 26 hectares. Of course, some participants are less eager than others, and the work is in different stages with different participants. Several longer phases, during which we couldn´t access the communities due to the pandemic, interrupted our work methodology, complicating our work significantly. Nonetheless, we are positive that we will get close to our goal of 24 installed hectares by the end of the year.

To support the agroforestry work we also held a full-day training at our permaculture center for the project participants in September. The training went more into detail about our agroforestry model, but also included a very practical part of how to correctly plant and care for seedlings of different valuable local Amazonian tree species, such as Cedar and Rosewood, among others. We also handed out over 2000 seedlings to the participants, to be planted in their agroforestry site.

We furthermore continued with community assemblies in the 4 surrounding villages to speak about communal land management and sustainable land use alternatives for the future. All four communities have at least had 2 such meetings and are closing in on a vision for their future land management. San Pedro, one of the communities, has completed the process and made communal agreements on future communal land use. We also continued our environmental education session in the local schools.

Finally, with regards to our own permaculture center, we have some exciting new developments to share. Our sister organization, the Temple of the Way of Light, with whom we share the land, has handed over infrastructure that it no longer uses to our Institute. This includes a large and beautiful house with dining area, kitchen, and toilet facilities, as well as plenty of rooms and several individual huts – opening a new world of possibilities for us. We have been busy planning an educational permaculture program, that includes monthly courses on a specific permaculture topic open to anyone. We are starting now in October with a 3-day introduction to permaculture. Finally, in September we also launched a regular volunteer program for people that want to stay with us for at least one month and deepen their tropical permaculture knowledge. We already have two volunteers working with us.

All the above will help us to further develop our permaculture center, improve our demonstration sites, and contribute to strengthening our work with local communities, creating a movement to regenerate the Amazon. None of this would be possible without your continued support. Thank you for being part of the movement.

With appreciation and gratitude,

The Chaikuni Team