Sustainable Harvest International

Donation: $50,000

Sustainable Harvest International (SHI) partners with smallholder farming families to improve their well-being through climate-smart farming. Our donation will allow SHI to help 50 farming families in Central America adopt agro-forestry, eliminate the deforestation caused by slash-and-burn farming, replace chemicals with organic inputs, and improve their food security.

Why They're Climate Smart

SHI helps farming families adopt practices that reduce their contribution to climate change. By partnering with rural communities and smallholder farming families who live and work on the front lines of widespread deforestation, SHI offers a climate-smart alternative to traditional farming methods while increasing food security, restoring soil health, and increasing biodiversity.

Families work with local SHI field trainers to shift away from slash-and-burn farming and agro-chemicals toward climate-smart techniques such as cover crops, mulch, composting, and agro-forestry. These practices integrate trees with other crops to regulate temperature, prevent soil erosion, and draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. (While locals like to say, "trees cause rain," they do much more.) These improvements can help farms withstand the negative impacts of climate change, such as droughts and heavy rains, and provide families with increased food security through stable crop yields, more diverse production of healthy food, and the opportunity to increase their income — all while transforming their farming practices into ones that have a positive impact on the environment.

Based on the experiences from these 50 families, SHI will encourage more organizations to adopt this methodology worldwide. Their goal is to halt the degradation of eight million acres of land (on a million farms) by 2030.

You can learn about and support SHI by donating.

Read our interview with Elliott Powell, executive director of Sustainable Harvest International.