Trees and Education Protect Rainforest in Brazil

Dear donors and project friends,

I would like to say that project “Trees and Education Protect Rainforest in Brazil” continues to spread its environmental activities and policies in Valença County and surroundings and to take local students and others to visit the Concordia Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary where they participate of an environmental education course “A Day in the Forest”. For us it is always a pleasure to offer to the community these forests trails trekking that gives students and teachers a wonderful and unique possibility to see Nature closely by visiting a well protected forest and also the farm's agroforestry demonstration areas. For most of these students it is the first time they visit a forest and it is for sure an unforgettable experience. After this day in the woods they will have a much better understanding of the environment and of the urgent need to keep these areas preserved in order to maintain the water sources and important parts of Brazilian wildlife. These last two groups were of older students so we could have a deeper discussion on several environmental issues. In the first of these groups some journalists from the local newspaper came along the trail and we had a very nice article about our work on the weekly paper. Please see pictures of these groups here: http://picasaweb.google.com/Boblamego/GGUpdate092010Schools?authkey=Gv1sRgCOKtpuHDr_-SWg

The agroforestry systems experiments did not suffer very much this year of very dry and hot weather, because we irrigated great part of our trees and the rainy season came early this year. The danger of fire is gone. This year we are planning to plant some 3000 seedlings of trees, palm tree and fruit trees. As we still do not produce all the seedlings we need we will have to buy 2000 with the project donations.

Last month we received a group of 30 M.Sc. students in a Professional Organic Agriculture degree, sponsored by Federal Rural University and EMBRAPA Agrobiologic Research Center, that came to visit our agroforestry research center, the CETAR, Regional Agroforestry Technology Center, and see and study the already 10 years old partnership experiments that we have with EMBRAPA, the Brazilian Government Agriculture Research Office in our forests, in planting 3 different agroforestry systems models. Please see pictures of this visit here: http://picasaweb.google.com/Boblamego/GGUpdate092010EMPRAPAVisitors?authkey=Gv1sRgCPWO95Lj0sTDag

I want to thank you all sincerely for your donations and support and say these help us a lot do our work and to keep on moving forward, spreading the sustainable development possibilities and ideas that can change our communities and countries.

Thank you again and all the best,

Roberto Lamego, Project Leader

Dear donors and project friends, The project “Trees and Education Protect Rainforest in Brazil” continues to take local students to visit the Concordia Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary and to participate of the environmental education course “A Day in the Forest”. Please see some attached photos of the last group. For us it is always a pleasure to be able to do these walks and to have this wonderful and unique possibility to take students to visit our forest and the farm’s agroforestry demonstration areas. As you already know, for most of these students it is the first time they visit a forest and I can say that it is an unforgettable experience and I am sure that after this excursion they will have a much better understanding of the environment and the need of forests to maintain the water sources. You can see through their faces how much they like it. We continue the agroforestry systems experiments and the plants and trees are growing nicely, due the very good rain season we had this year. The dry season approaches and with the irrigation system we have now it will be possible to irrigate all the new plants that suffer very much during the dry period. This year we have planted again more than 2000 seedlings of trees, palm tree and fruit trees. I would like to say that without you support none of this would be possible and I am very grateful to all of you. Thank you. All the best, Roberto