WYNNE FARM CONTINUES ADVANCING SMALLHOLDER FARMER OPTIMIZATION

The Wynne Farm, in the mountains of Kenscoff above Port au Prince, has provided essential support to the Global Institute For Transformation (GIFT) smart sweet potato farming efforts. 

Founder Jane Wynne has long been advancing smallholder farming, and she helped GIFT secure slips and tools for planting and  advises program participants on how to plant and grow the crops.  She is also working with a half dozen villagers to introduce sweet potato farming to them.

Wynne Farm,  Kenskoff was engage to lead  a Global Institute For Transformation (GIFT) four site pilot effort along with representatives from University of Fondwa, Association of Peasaants of Fondwa and the Sisters of St. Anthony of Fondwa  and Wynne Farm.

Wynne Farm took an active lead in helping to manage the overall project across the multipl sites in collaboration with the University of Fondwa School of Agronomoy

Results

Cultivars / multiplication

During this pilot experiment, we saw the characteristic of some varieties against pests. Beauregard and Ti Beta varieties are resistant to certain pests (no variety is resistant to sweetpotato weevil) or diseases (except where virus-free plants have been subjected to tissue culture as was the case of the 3 varieties).

Quantified results

At Wynne Farm, 300 sweet potato cuttings were planted. And from these cuttings, 300 more cuttings were prepared through propagation. The 300 base cuttings each gave between 2 and 3 potatoes per cuttings. This gives a total between 600 to 900 sweet potatoes. And more are still growing and developing.

EMPHASIZING GROWTH OF LEAVES AS NUTRITIONAL PRODUCT

For sweet potato leaves, because of their nutritional importance (higher in protein, beta-carotene, calcium, phosphorus, iron and vitamin C than spinach). Wynne Far decided to add incremental nitrogen fertilizer to produce a lot of leaf to fight against malnutrition as a focused  element of the project, which can set the stage ongoing reliance of the crop for edible leaves.