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.:ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE YEAR
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Summary of HELP Collaborative Achievements in 2009
- Malawian/CIDA/UofR Collaboration with HELP (October 28, 2009)
- Books for Africa: In collaboration with teacher's group (organized from Humboldt, Kerrobert, Saskatoon and Weyburn) and CARITAS, HELP and volunteers load first two containers of 80,000 books for shipping over past month for programming in Tanzania and Kenya (September and October, 2009). This program carefully selects good used books of value for schools overseas. The first shipment of 40,000 books is providing books whose replacement value would be $600,000 at a cost of transport and programming of only $15,000. This program shows that the cost of providing critical books like encyclopedia, dictionaries, atlases, curriculum and library books for very needy schools from recycled used books is only 2.5% the cost of providing new books.
- HELP R and D:
- Root Trained Tomato producing award winning sixty-five tomatoes on one plant (verifications by Weyburn Horticulture Society April to September, 2009). This strongly suggests that simple techniques in root training provide attractive alternatives to more complex/costly plant breeding and genetic modification to create plant drought resistence and superior food production. The implications for sharing low cost methods of dramatically increasing food production in the southern hemisphere is enormous.
- 70,000 hybrid poplar 'floating nursery' system developed at HELP (2009 season). This experiment discovered a low cost method of producing rooted plugs from cuttings in low cost outdoor nurseries using predominantly waste materials.
- Direct seeding from tree to portable nursery containers successfully developed for elm and cotton wood at HELP (2009)
- HELP's appro-tec paper mill trials a success in collaboration program with Stewart Steel (September, October 2009)
- HELP's 2010 International Green Technology Internship Program receiving interns from Ukraine , Nepal , Cameroon , Mozambique and Kenya . This is the sixteenth year of HELP receiving international interns during the six-month spring and summer season. The program historically received interns exclusively from HELP's Africa programs. The program over the past couple of years began attracting higher trained interns to participate in HELP's strategic research and development certificate program. The Interns in 2009 came from Africa, France and other Canadian provinces. The increasingly robust R and D program at HELP is in part attributable to this internship program that has for example attracted a masters level ecological architecture researcher from France in 2009 and a structural engineer from Cameroon for 2010. Several of the interns come with backing from post secondary institutions as well as organizations and industry partners in development overseas.
- HELP starts first styrofoam recycling program in Saskatchewan (July, 2009). The styrofoam is being milled using conventional farm technology (mix mill with hammer mill, bale feeder and mixer for fire retardant additive).
- HELP's Salinity Reversal Forestation Establishment Trials for Sask Power on farms below Poplar Dam a success. The initial saline resistant and hydraulic control trees (14,000 so far) planted below Poplar Dam have been verified in the 2009 joint HELP/Sask Power field survey to have a significant survival rate such that Sask Power and HELP are discussing an additional 7,000 trees for the biggest salinity control planting in Saskatchewan so far. Background: HELP carried out the first research in Saskatchewan (on Porter Land in Wellington RM given up from farming due to severe salinity) in an effort to prove that trees and other permanent cover could reverse severe salinity. The Porter site became visibly saline-free in seven years in a context of common belief that it takes several decades of remediation to reverse severe salinity.
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© HELP International 2014 |
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