Start Now

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The Belize Project In 1980, the Start Now impresarios (Glenn and Jean, see About Us ) bought quite a lot of land in Belize, Central America. The land was deemed worthless, and therefore was cheap. Belize, the former British Honduras, was pillaged for mahogany for sailing ships in the colonial days. As we now know, clear cut tropical forests don't regenerate, because almost all of the organic material necessary to support life is in the trees. Take them away, and the land that is left is devoid of topsoil and exposed to the deluge of tropical rain, about 130 inches per year in the area where we bought land. The rain quickly washes away the remaining fertility, and the land remains barren. You might believe, as we did, that the soil, after all, is only necessary for plants to stand in, and that the addition of purchased fertilizer will correct the barrenness problem. This is what the "green revolution" taught in decades past. Soluble chemical fertilizer acts quickly, and plants respond with rapid growth. We planned citrus orchards for the empty land. We thought that they would increase the value of the land and make our fortune. The time was right for new citrus orchards. Massive plantings in Brazil had been killed by rampant disease. We raised trees on a disease resistant rootstock, expecting to fill a hungry market. Poor drainage kept our land too soggy for much of the year, but some earth moving fixed that problem. We laid out several hundred acres of new orchards, and created Parrot Hill Farm. We shipped in and applied fertilizer, and sure enough, the trees put on a spurt of growth. It wasn't long at all, however, before growth slowed, leaves looked pale, and nutrient deficiencies appeared. We applied more fertilizer. The cycle repeated, a bit shorter this time. Soon we realized that the soluble fertilizer was washing away in the heavy rains, and the barren, sandy soil itself had nothing to offer. We couldn't buy enough fertilizer to keep the trees going, and certain failure was looming. We didn't give up, but looked for better answers. We found them in books of soil science and organic agriculture. This led us to the discovery of much wider problems resulting from the use of agricultural chemicals, problems with worldwide significance, including global warming, which is only now coming to widespread acceptance as a dominant issue. Our research back then in the eighties led us to organic agriculture solutions, which brought about dramatic recovery of our orchards, and more than that, resulted in creation of deep and fertile topsoil where there was once only worthless sand. (For more information on the Parrot Hill Farm project, see " Agribusiness in the Tropics .") We thought the ecological significance of our project was more important than the fortune, and so invested the entire project into a newly formed non-profit corporation, Start Now, formed for the purpose of establishing and carrying on commercial projects which would improve earth's ecology.

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