Open source farming in Bangladesh on a personal level was not a good idea for me as most of my villagers are farmers. Now I said this is not a good idea because I tried many things open source, for example open source Dairy farming. But most of the people were not ready to contribute. So financially it was a flop idea.
Anyway, in the Covid-19 time, most of my country’s people are facing economic disaster where 80% of people live below the poverty line. I used to help some of my s2m guys with the help of Ronald Van Den Hoff and sometimes from my pocket. Then I realise this Covid thing is not going anywhere soon from my country as most of the people are careless and we are one of the most populated countries in the world. So I plan to produce the food instead of buying it. I have some small land in abundance where I am supposed to build my future home.
The first problem was, I am not a farmer nor a tough guy to farm a land, I may buy some seeds and work a little too. And I never really wanted to give free vegetables to neighbours or my S2m guys without any contribution from their side. Involve people and grow. That’s one thing I learn from Ronald, Jurjen, and Nick.
So to start the farming project, I invited my uncles who are already farmers and they humbly rejected me because they need to grow rice which is hard work, so they can’t help me on this. Then I figured out, I have to use energy from lazy people. So I invited my cousins since they are students and have nothing to do right now as schools and colleges are shut down. They said: “Let’s do it!”.
Then I invited some of my S2m guys, 3 of them said yes. We started planning what to grow. My father said, let’s plant something that will grow soon. So we planted potato, eggplant and a lot of spinach. We used to eat a lot of spinach here. Very fond of red spinach.
Red spinach grows very fast so it is already available in our garden. There are some vegetable trees too.
Some eggplants and cucumbers are already delivered to people’s homes.
The open source farming idea was just to grow food in abundance and share just to make sure that people have food security. Some people liked it, some people didn’t and I respect everyone’s opinion. I do what I love to do.
Jurjen himself visited one of my Uncle”s gardens that we are also using as open source farming.
Thank you for reading. Please keep us on your prayers as we are dealing with careless people about Covid-19 and cyclones, floods and sudden storms. We are living in the coastal and facing this problem more than other people. Will soon write an article about daily life in Bangladesh dealing with all this.
I would like to thank my friend/mentor Jurjen de Vries for the idea and all the care for S2m Bangladesh and for me.
#stayconnected
