Vegetable and tuber crops offer Haitian farmers substantial income opportunities. ORE offers technical assistance identifying markets, sourcing seeds, and improving production, grading and marketing.

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Your donations to ORE will have a real and lasting impact on reducing poverty and improving the environment in Haiti. Every gift goes straight to the people you want to help. As a US 501(c) Non Profit organization with over 25 years of Haitian-based activities, we are able to keep our costs to a minimum ensuring that your gift goes directly to those with the greatest needs.

Increasing lucrative production of vegetable and tuber crops

Vegetable and tuber crops currently represent a small percentage of the farmers' production system. The result is low-income agriculture. Vegetable production offers many opportunities to earn substantial income. But Haitian farmers are generally limited by the high risks associated with these crops. They are also constrained by the scarcity of suitable seeds and essential inputs, low soil fertility, and their lack of marketing skills. But these factors can easily be resolved by making seeds and ag inputs available and providing the necessary technical assistance. Tubers such as yams are also high revenue crops, but their production is restricted by the scarcity of plant material. This is due to the low multiplication rates resulting from traditional propagation techniques, but which can be resolved by utilizing rapid multiplication techniques such as minisetting. However, unfortunately, historically little has been done to improve any of these crops and as a result potential revenues have been lost.

 

The key steps in promoting commercial program involving high revenue vegetable crops are market analysis, assessment of production and market risks, selection of crops and production calendars, procurement of seeds, and technical assistance for production, post-harvest, grading and transportation. Vegetable production can be highly profitable, but the risks are high. Both local and export markets are volatile, and prone to seasonal and regional overproduction. Buyers are not always reliable. The economic risk to the farmer is one of the primary concerns. To reduce the risks involved, crop diversification is recommended, involving a balanced mix of high-risk crops together with lower revenue, staple crops.

ORE has specialized in the propagation of improved plant material and offers the farmers items such as: yams seeds from minisetting, sweet potato cuttings of the successful Tapato and Toguecita varieties, export quality hot pepper seeds and many others. We also source and supply commercial vegetable seeds to farmer groups.

The following crops have been developed to date:
Hot peppers: West Indian Red, local Ti Bouk
Sweet Potato: Tapato and Toguecita varieties
Calabassa Squash: Panama and Jamaican and local red varieties
Yams: Yellow and Plenbit varieties
Shallots: Local varieties

ORE has put local producer groups in touch with exporters and local buyers and offers training for participating farmer groups in production, pest management, accounting and marketing. Our long-term goal is to promote the establishment of regional post-harvest marketing facilities, offering farmer groups an appropriate environment for storage, handling and grading of their produce. The goal is to coordinate regional production on a large enough scale to attract buyers from the local and international markets.

A look at vegetable and tuber production

 

Support our efforts to give farmers more bamboo

 Bamboo is a great resource for farmers for their building and handicraft needs
and bamboo poles of the new solid varieties provide a good income.
The tree’s productive life can be safely estimated at 30-40 years.
The cost of a bamboo plant is about $5.
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