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