Bocashi (from the Japanese bokashi) is a highly effective natural fertilizer.  More than 50 of the families working with SHI in Honduras have started making bocashi on their farms. All are reporting great success.
     Though there are many different techniques for making bocashi, SHI participants have developed a simple recipe that works well for them and requires only materials that are readily available.  Manure, coffee pulp or rice hulls, yeast and molasses are mixed with healthy soil.  The yeast becomes active when it comes in contact with the molasses and the fermentation process begins.  
     The bocashi mixture ferments and decomposes for a period of 15 days. Each morning and night it should be mixed  so that it does not become too hot.  At the end of the 15-day fermentation period, the bocashi is ready to use or, as our field staff members explain, "ready to feed the earth.”
      There are a number of uses for this special compost.  Most of the farmers working with SHI have found it most helpful in their tree nurseries and vegetable gardens.  Honduran farmer, Ramon Salguero, (shown right) has had huge success using bocashi on his corn field.  Safe, effective  and inexpensive, bocashi is a wonderful alternative to unsustainable and expensive chemical fertilizers!
 

"I am very grateful for the support that SHI has given me.  As an experiment, I started with about ½ an acre using the organic techniques that Jacobo Suazo [the local SHI extensionist] taught me.  This land produced 3,000 lbs of corn!  It is incredible but true!  Now, after seeing such wonderful results, we are growing an additional acre of corn.  We are using organic  bocashi compost which I have learned to make myself.  I would like to start my own small business making bocashi, but people still don't believe the results until they witness them.  I don"t have to worry about the rising prices of chemical fertilizers because I know how to make my own natural ones.”   -Ramon Salguero, SHI-Honduras Participant Farmer

Click here to read an article by SHI Development Director Bob St. Peter on the benefits of using bocashi and other alternatives to chemical fertilizers.

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