12. Making Pizza

Every once in a while Pun Pun has a pizza day. There is a wood-buring stove made by earthern building techniques (i.e., made with mud and rice husks) right in the back of the kitchen area built for this purpose.

Many of the ingredients for pizza pies are grown right on the farm, such as oregano, sweet and holy basil, sweet and hot peppers, and onions. The other ingredients, wheat flour, yeast, cheese and such are purchased locally. When the rainy season ends tomatoes are also grown on the farm.

The day starts by preparing the pizza pie crusts. Water, wheat and yeast are mixed into dough and left to rise. While the dough is rising, we go and pick the fresh herbs and vegetables for the toppings. 

Wood-burning stove made from mud and rice husks

Picking fresh basil

Pizza dough left to rise

Ray rolling out the dough

Cutting the cheese (ha!)

Pizza crusts and ingredients ready to go!

Everyone prepares their own special pizza

Into the stove they go

It only takes about one or two minutes to cook the pizzas. On this night we made 45 personal-sized pizzas. Yummy.

11. European Union Free Trade Agreement (EU FTA) Protest. September 18-19, 2013.

This week negotiations between Thailand and the European Union were held in Chiang Mai to discuss a Free Trade Agreement. Countries which are developing, like Thailand, have never done well with Free Trade Agreements. It means they enter agreements with other countries without any preferential tax breaks, and since Thailand is still developing, many small farmers and businesses will suffer. Thailand imports more processed goods (expensive) and exports more raw goods (inexpensive), so the agreement is not in their favour. Furthermore, the European Union hopes to tighten up patent laws and intellectual property rights (IPR) over pharmaceuticals and agricultural products. Currently to do business in Thailand, a foreign company must lease their patents, which allows Thailand to manufacture drugs, software, what have you, locally and cheaply. With the FTA, the patent laws will be tightened up, no more licensing, and the time a patent is valid will be extended from 20 years to 25 years. This would mean drugs will be more expensive in Thailand. Those with chronic conditions requiring expensive patented drugs will suffer - they will no longer be able to afford medicines to keep them alive. 


In regards to agriculture: there are large corporate producers of food that stand to gain from the EU FTA, since they can ship their produce to Europe tax-free. The chicken and shrimp industries will gain, but other smaller farmers will not benefit from such an agreement. As what happens in the developed world, to earn a decent income, farmers must buy in to the corporate method of food production. This means they purchase seed, fertilizer, and pesticides from the agricultural supplier, and in return their produce is sold to the corporate distributor. The distributor will not buy produce from farmers who are not in their system. Farmers who want to cultivate a wider range of varieties of, say, rice or chickens, will not be able to sell their produce, so why do it? The danger for the future is this narrowing of the gene pool to a few strains means total dependence on a system that, if something goes wrong, everyone will go hungry. The push-back is to allow farmers to be in control of what they grow, how they grow it, and ensure a wide variety of produce reaches the consumer. Besides, variety is the spice of life!


So the protest was held by Thai farmers and medical professions who foresee the cost of food and drugs increasing.


It was a sweltering day in Chiang Mai for the walk to the 5-star hotel Le Meridien where the negotiations were taking place. The goal was to give the negotiators a letter outlining the issues Thai farmers and medical suppliers see as sticking points.

Pun Pun has a stake in this adventure, so we were there for support. It was a gentle protest. I mean, Thai farmers? What will they do? Throw rice at police?


It was peaceful.


It made the front page of the Bangkok Post:

Here's the story:

http://m.bangkokpost.com/topstories/370386



On a more personal note, I took photos. Here they are:

Poster at our booth

Slogan: Occupy our seeds

Solidarity

Giving away Pun Pun seeds at the protest

Break dancing entertainment at the event

Audience enjoying the entertainment

Protest banner 

Gearing up for the protest walk

Walking to Le Meridien Hotel

About 5,000 protesters joined the walk

About 500 Riot Police guarding the hotel

Line between the protestors and the hotel.
The event was peaceful

Sitting and waiting for the EU negotiator to
come out and accept the letter of protest

Life is not for sale: reference to patented
organisms developed by corporations

It was a fun day,  but more importantly, mission accomplished. The negotiator came out to greet the crowd and accepted the letter of protest.

10. Picking Bamboo Shoots

We went out to the forest with Khun Daeng, a neighbor who does a lot of the cooking at Pun Pun, to find wild bamboo shoots. Bamboo shoots are good for eating, can be pickled for longer storage, and can be sold in the market. 

It was damp in the forest, this being the rainy season, which is ideal for bamboo to grow. At first it was hard to see exactly what Khun Daeng was looking for, but once we got the hang of it, we collected three sacks of bamboo shoots in a few hours.

Here are the photos of our day finding bamboo shoots.

A moody day at the height of the rainy season

Into the forest we go

Khun Daeng looking for bamboo shoots

Using a tool to cut the bamboo shoot

Hard to see, but this is what we were looking for - young, soft shoots

Khun Daeng with the result of her efforts

Peggy finds a big one!

Pouring out the bag of collected bamboo shoots

Bamboo has hair. avoid touching it:
it's itchy!

Cutting to obtain the edible parts

Trimmed and ready for the kitchen

It's best to cook bamboo shoots in water since there is trace levels of cyanide, a poison, in raw bamboo. 

9. Testing the Water at Pun Pun

In an earlier post I mentioned Pun Pun devised a relatively cheap water filtration system made by readily available materials so there is drinking water on the farm for everyone.

But what about the quality of the water? What do they do to ensure the water is safe to drink?

This missive is about how the water at Pun Pun is tested. 

First a review of the system. Here is what the water system looks like:

Pun Pun's Water Filtration System

Left to right: rocks get gradually smaller inside the tanks.
Last tank contains charcoal

Water is pumped up to the holding tanks and goes through the filtration process, as follows: 


Starting from the left, the first tank contains large pebbles. Water is fed from the top of the tank and is piped down to the bottom. With the force of gravity from the water falling down the pipe, the water is pushed up through small rocks, capturing large impurities before flowing into the second tank. The second tank contains sand. Water is fed from above the sand level and flows down through the sand, removing  microorganisms and smaller matter. Sand filtration is a good method to remove quite a bit more impurities and many pathogens, but is a little slower. A thin layer of microorganisms grows at the top surface of the sand, helping to capture them. Then the water is piped up to the third tank and falls through the charcoal filter. The charcoal removes the remaining chemical and pathogen residues, rendering the water drinkable.  

But how safe is it?

Every few weeks the water is tested for dissolved organic matter and iron. Samples are taken at the water source (the pond), then at the holding tanks, and then at each water filter tower. The samples are analyzed with a portable water tester. The resulting data are sent to Josh Kearns, Ph.D. candidate, at the  University of North Carolina where he further calibrates the results to keep accurate records of how well the filter is working effectively over time. 

Here is the method for water sampling and testing in pictures:

Nate Reents with the water sampling kit

Dipping the bottle in the pond

Taking a sample of the water pumped up to the holding tanks

Sampling the water in each filtration tank

Back in the main hall, calibrating the testing equipment

Filling the test tube with a water sample

Putting test tube into the equipment to run a test

Reading the findings

All the data are recorded so the changes to the water quality can be carefully monitored. Once the filtered water reaches a threshold of contaminants, it's time to clean out the filters (about four times a year).

8. Sprouting Seeds and Planting

Pun Pun gets a variety of seeds from around the world from people who willingly send or bring seeds to the farm. Recall one of Pun Pun's missions is to cultivate a wide variety of seeds to save them, thus enhancing biodiversity. Today's cash crop farms grow only a few strains, and only a few large-scale mega suppliers encourage the planting of their products - at a profit - and control a large amount of food production world-wide. The problem with such a system where farmers are dependent on seed from such suppliers is that should something happen to the strain they supply, food production in the world will grind to a halt.  Pun Pun encourages farmers to cultivate a wide range of seeds that grow well in their farm conditions , and not be dependent solely on suppliers of seed to produce food. After all, if you look at nature, there are many millions of forms of life on this planet. By narrowing the gene pool down to a few is counter what nature does. Fecundity, diversity and change is what nature is about, and in this spirit, Pun Pun farm emulates biodiversity for the benefit of future generations of farmers.  

Many seeds are tried out at Pun Pun to see if they grow or not in the climate here in northern Thailand; some work and some do not. It's a matter of experimenting with them. That is what makes Pun Pun a lot of fun - try things out for ourselves to observe what happens, take note of what the outcome is, and try again.

When we interns first arrived, the second day being here we had the task to put seeds into trays to cultivate sprouts. Once the plants sprouted, we replanted them into beds we prepared in a field on the farm. We sprouted rice, wheat, rye, kamut, several varieties of lettuce and cabbage, and tomatoes. Below is the photo step by step account.

Sprouting Seeds and Planting

First we prepared sprout trays for the seeds. We found some soil that was not too sandy nor contained too much clay - it's important to allow the seedlings to penetrate the soil with their roots and also easy to take out once they sprouted and were ready for replanting. To the soil we mixed chicken poop as fertilizer, to boost growth of the sprouts.  We filled the trays with soil and chicken poop (about half and half carefully mixed) and then put seeds into the trays. Each tray was labelled and noted for what type of plant was contained. 

September 2. Trays prepared and planted with seeds.

September 5. Sprouts!

September 7. Sprouts really growing tall.

September 8. Rice almost ready for replanting.

September 8. Two leaves come out first
which provide nourishment for lettuce. 

September 12. Time to replant wheat, rye and kamut.

Pi Jo carefully plants the sprouts.

We interns pitch in. Faster, and fun to do this work!

Pi Jo opening some compost to add to the plant beds.

Spreading compost on the bed.

Spreading straw over compost and soil mix.
Straw inhibits weed growth and keeps the soil moist.

Planting shoots in new bed.

Pulling weeds around some climbing beans.

Putting sticks around the climbing beans
 to act as a trellis. 

Everyone pitching in to allow beans to climb.

In a few weeks I'll write more on the progress of our plants.