Eco-farming in Fiji.

In a promising agricultural experiment, a boys' school is linking five different micro-industries so that the waste from each becomes a key input to another.

Last November, a 72-year-old ecologist named George Chan met with four other men on the largest island of Fiji - one of the remotest countries on Earth, lying 11 time zones west of Peru and three zones east of Australia in the South Pacific - to plan an extraordinary experiment. Chart is an advocate of integrated farming, which in principle means using the waste of one agricultural industry as fertilizer or fuel for another, in a loop that will dump little or no pollution into the environment. What Chan planned now sounded almost too good to be possible: from the sludge now being discarded by a large Fijian brewery, five healthy new enterprises would grow. What was now a troublesome pollutant would be turned into crops of fresh mushrooms, chickens, fish, vegetables, and fuel for electric power.

The site of the meeting - and of the prospective experiment - was a school for disadvantaged boys', called Montfort Boys' Town, where the students traditionally have helped raise both food and funds by farming fish in ponds. With Chan were two of the school's teachers, along with a bearded professor who is considered the world's top expert on mushrooms, and a Belgian business executive from the U.N. University in Tokyo, who had brought the group together in the belief that this experiment could have widespread benefits around the world.

Fiji was chosen for several reasons: it is poor, and integrated farming offers a way of bringing efficient, sustainable agriculture to low-income developing countries without introducing the problems - such as heavy pollution, vulnerability to pests which plague monocrop farming, loss of jobs to mechanization, and heavy export dependence - that accompany large-scale conventional agriculture in many such countries. Fiji also has an established fish-farming industry, so the new business would not be entirely alien. But most important, Fiji is facing a ticking clock: its largest agricultural industry is sugar, and there are signs that that industry could go into a serious decline within a few years. Fiji needed something to shore up its endangered sugar export economy.

The Montfort Boys' Town was chosen because it offered a ready environment for such an experiment. Montfort's students arc all low-income (many are orphans), and the school puts strong emphasis on practical training for local industries - so many of the students were already familiar with traditional methods of fish-farming. Thus the school's labor would produce both food and income. And the experiment would link the students' education to their country's need for a more productive, less polluting economy.

Beer and Mushrooms

Outside the Montford School dining room where the five planners met, just a few hundred meters away, the experiment is being set up. Chan takes me to see it; we go through a wood gate, jump over some muddy spots, and climb down some embankments to a reed-thatched hut - the place where the mushrooms will grow. The hut looks like a traditional Fijian home, the kind that was common before corrugated metal became the standard roofing material on the islands and scrap metal became a common material for walls. It is one room only, with the thatch covering both roof and walls.

Chan gestures, proudly telling me that the hut was built by the students of Montfort Boys' Town, using the same techniques that have been used here for centuries; they cut structural members from mangrove trees on the school's land, and hand-gathered reeds for the thatch. If this were a house, a family of perhaps five or six would sleep on mats on the floor, two or three to a bed. But instead of a family's meager belongings, rows of shelves fill the hut. On each shelf, mushrooms will grow in large plastic tubes.

Soon, these tubes will be supplied with brewery waste, a wet mash rich in chemically-bonded carbohydrate that animals cannot digest, mixed with rice straw, sawdust, or shredded newspaper. Mushrooms produce an enzyme that unlocks the processed grain, allowing the mushroom to extract its own energy for growth while leaving behind a residue that can be used as food for chickens, pigs, and other animals. S.T. Chang, the mushroom expert, has travelled to Boys' Town to observe the climate, and has selected three kinds of mushrooms to grow there: shiitake (Lentinus), the second highest-priced mushrooms in the world, oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus), which are easy to grow in the tropics, and straw mushrooms (Volvariella), which are common in Vietnam. Each of the three should thrive in the wet climate near Suva, Fiji's capital. The mushrooms are being cleared by a laboratory a few kilometers away at the Fijian agriculture department, for registered use on the island. A native species of mushrooms would have been preferable, but none was available that would grow quickly in this medium.

The spent brewer's grain will be free, of course; if the school doesn't take it, the brewery will simply dump it into Suva's harbor as it always has. Though spent grain can provide as much as about a quarter of its weight in protein, there are few marketable uses for it. According to both Chan and Chang, there are only two practical ways to break down the grain and make use of this protein: to feed it to earthworms and to grow mushrooms. They are planning to do both at Montfort. (Mushrooms will be produced first, because they have higher market value; a third alternative would be to use expensive chemicals to break down the grain, but those leave no saleable products at the end.)

While bringing an economic windfall to the local economy, this use of the brewer's grain will also cut down on a particularly damaging source of pollution. Fiji's islands are surrounded by exceptional coral reefs - some of them so impressive that they led Jean-Michel Cousteau to choose the Fijian island of Taveuni, the third largest, for the location of his scuba-diving resort. Yet, the brewery's waste has covered some of the reefs, raising the temperature and alkalinity of the water and destroying local marine life. The quantity of waste now dumped by the brewery - some 400,000 cubic meters per year - is an ecological disaster that is also harmful to the food chain that supplies fish to many Fijians. If the Montfort experiment succeeds, other projects too may begin diverting the waste, and that burden could begin to recede.

As the mushrooms grow, they produce a residue. In a conventional mushroom farm, this stuff is essentially wasted, dumped on fields where it may fertilize crops but may also overwhelm them with muck. At Montfort, however, the boys will shovel it into pails and carry it by hand over to a small wooden shack, just a few meters away, which houses chickens and pigs. The mushroom residue is both nutritious and safe for animals, and so makes an excellent slop, or food. Because they have such animals, the students at Montfort get to cat meat of one kind or another - chicken, pork, mutton, or fish - almost every day. This is food that almost none of them would be able to afford outside the school.

Every day or two, those animals' wastes will be taken, again by hand, a few more meters away and put into a "decomposer" - a concrete-and-metal contraption about the size of a dumpster like those found behind large apartment buildings in industrial countries. Inside, the chemicals in the wastes will separate, with the separated constituents going toward the production of either energy or fertilizer. As methane gas is released, it collects in a compartment at the top of the box, while the solid or liquid wastes settle to the bottom.

The methane will be captured in bottles and taken to a gas generator to run the lights of the school, or sold. Later, a pipeline may be built to carry the gas to the school buildings. The decomposer will produce the equivalent of about three gallons of gasoline a day, a useful amount in a school for disadvantaged boys in a low-income country. Without the decomposer, the gas would be vented into the atmosphere, and its economic value lost.

Meanwhile, the solid matter that is left after the gas is bled off will move in a solution of water through several compartments of the digester, at each stage losing some of its bacteria and some of its potential for spreading illness. When it emerges from the last compartment, this decontaminated manure will be nearly converted into the same "NPK" nutrients - nitrogen, phosphorous, and potash - normally used as fertilizers on farm fields. It will be nearly converted, but not quite. With the help of gravity, it will then flow through three cleansing ponds, where bacteria, plankton, and other micro-scavengers will consume any residual unwanted parts of the original animal wastes. What will emerge from the last pond, and drop into a large fish pond, is a perfect fish food. George Chan has practiced this process in ponds in Vietnam and Mauritius, and predicts that about 80 percent of the food needed by the fish will come from this system via the decomposer.

The large fish pond has an ecology of its own, with six kinds of fish, from top feeders and grass carp that eat from the embankments, down to bottom-feeding carp, along with small crabs, prawns, and various plankton. While it is an artificial ecology, it maintains a rough balance that is intended to require no major interventions, such as the use of antibiotics to fight disease or the frequent cleanings required in conventional fish farming. Montfort will not even have to purchase additional feed.

In a conventional fish farm, feed is the largest single expense. For every $1,000 in sales, conventional fish farms in Fiji are currently spending hundreds of dollars on grain or fish-meal food for the fish. Two other major expenses of ordinary fish farms are energy for water pumps and antibiotics to fend off diseases. Montfort will not need any pumps or electricity for the ponds, since the design capitalizes on gravity, and Chan hopes this project will not need any antibiotics either. Integrated fish farming is meant to keep disease at bay the same way integrated pest management keeps pests in check on crops. Because the pond won't be stocked with a single, monoculture species, it won't be vulnerable to having its harvest wiped out by a simple outbreak of disease.

Some of the fish, probably the ones with the least market value, will be eaten by the students; the rest will be sold. On top of the pond, more food will be grown hydroponically. Flowers, strawberries, and high-value vegetables such as golden needle will be grown in Montfort, floating on the water so that their roots can draw nutrients from the dissolved fish waste. Most of these plants will be exported from Fiji. The plants thus provide a fifth integrated industry - and another revenue stream for the school.

While the Montfort farm will be a development project with both ecological and social benefits, it is also a serious science experiment - and the fully integrated farming ponds will operate side-by-side with a control group. Just a few meters away, Montfort Boys' Town has long been using six ordinary fish ponds to raise food and income. Each has a chicken coop on top, the wastes from which drop directly into the water for consumption by the fish and aquatic creatures, which makes them already more integrated than most fish farms. But these controls do not benefit from a decomposer or mushroom growing, and do not reduce ocean dumping. The productivity of each system will be tallied, and the costs compared over time. This should provide a measure of the real benefits of the integrated method, since both systems will use the same land, the same water, and the same workers.

If the winner of this contest proves to be George Chan's plan, then Montfort will convert its six other ponds into the pollution-free, input-free variety as well. And Montfort's sister institution, the Montfort Technical Institute, a school for both boys and girls on Vanua Levu, Fiji's second-largest island, will do the same. Other schools and farmers, in Mauritius and Vietnam, as well as elsewhere in Fiji, will follow.

The Ups and Downs of Farming in Cycles

The Technical Institute was launched just last year. At the inauguration, the new venture in integrated agriculture was already a topic of conversation. A local representative of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization expressed skepticism. With an integrated system, he said, it is the ecological need that selects which kinds of fish are raised, and which other crops are produced. (Some environmentalists say that is precisely what the pattern should be if an economy is to be sustainable.) But in the marketplace, the prices of fish and crops are set according to the tastes and demands of buyers. An integrated farm, he cautioned, cannot easily shift its production toward the crops that have the highest prices, so it will earn less money. For many analysts, this violation of economic gospel is enough to void any benefits of linking one crop's growth to another's waste.

Another objection came from a local expert in conventional aquaculture. In the new scheme, he said, there is no tradition. It's not like growing taro (a potato-like root crop), which every Fijian knows how to do. The brewery-mushroom-chicken-methane scheme is dauntingly unfamiliar and complex. It requires more foresight because more things could go wrong. People like tradition, he said, and they learn by it. So, anyone who forsakes tradition faces an uphill battle.

George Chan bemoans this difficulty as well. "Even with just pouring concrete to build the decomposer, we have lots of problems," he says. "And you have to remember, these are semi-skilled workers." The benefit of having free work by students is really a tradeoff, because they are learning while they work, with all the missteps that accompany the learning process.

A third skeptical response came from two men who manage other fish ponds on the island. As the Montfort plan was described to them, they exchanged knowing glances, suggesting that they thought the plan will turn out to be a mistake. Later, they give Chan and his European sponsor, Gunter Pauli, a tour of their own ponds - large operations that spend large amounts of money on feed. As the four men talked, though, the two managers seemed increasingly drawn to the idea of being able to cut the costs of feed. By the end of the conversation, though not converted, they were openly curious - and had resolved to look into this business more seriously.

Visitors to the project from similar schools on the Solomon Islands, about 1,200 kilometers to the North-West (a distance that seems shorter by the large scale of the South-Pacific than it would in other parts of the world), seemed more optimistic. One brushed aside the concern about forsaking tradition, pointing out that young students have to learn how to do the work whether their ciders know how or not. "Some will pick it up, some won't," he shrugged. One of the teachers, Brother Paul, agrees. He told me later that of the 144 kids at Boys' Town, about 25 had asked to do special classes in integrated farming.

Gunter Pauli headed off some of the other criticisms, pointing out that fish has become an increasingly valuable commodity, not just in Fiji, but everywhere. As the human population has expanded, the oceanic fish catch appears to have reached its sustainable limits, and the growing demand is already driving prices higher. The potential market for farmed fish is huge. And, of course, the food eaten directly by students and teachers at the school has a value of its own. Moreover, Pauli says, on an island with little income and limited resources, maximizing efficiency almost always makes sense, especially when it helps reduce the human impact on the environment.

In fact, such efficiency in resource use has been practiced in other places for centuries - and used to be far more common than it is today. In China and Southeast Asia, people have dumped household waste into fish ponds for thousands of years. The pre-Columbian civilizations of Mexico had elaborate systems of canals in their cities, with fish crops living in the canals and thriving on the cities' wastes. Today's efforts in this field are, to some degree, efforts to rediscover lost techniques, as well as to use new ecological knowledge to take them further - and to adapt them to modern economies.

Others are doing this as well. Wes Jackson's work at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, is designed to capture the thrift and stability of natural systems for the cultivation of grain. In Alberta, Canada, a company named Arbokem is producing tree-free paper from postconsumer fiber and wheat straw, with no chlorinated chemical waste or effluent. At the United Nations University in Tokyo, Gunter Pauli is working with a "Zero Emissions Research Initiative" - which supports not only the Boys' Town project but other initiatives to clean up industries in countries from Latvia to Columbia. A new journal of industrial ecology is being launched by Yale University Press to foster communication among the many people trying to find ways to incorporate ecological patterns in modern industries. At the grassroots level, the nature of agriculture - and perhaps ultimately, of all human industry - is undergoing a transformation.

Global Trade and Local Fish

The backbone of Fiji's agriculture is sugar, which accounts for about a third of the country's export earnings. Much of the land is dedicated to growing sugar cane, and the crop employs a quarter of the country's labor force. About 98 percent of the crop is exported. Half goes through the United Kingdom, the former colonizer of Fiji, to the European Union at preferential prices that were agreed to under the Lome Convention on international trade in 1963. A small amount is also exported to the United States. These affluent buyers pay 1.5 to 2 times the world price. Without those preferential prices, Fiji could not compete with larger countries such as Indonesia and Brazil, which with their huge economics of scale can grow sugar more cheaply.

Now, however, there are signs that these preferential deals are coming to an end, possibly within the next eight to 10 years, because of new international trade agreements that will phase out preferential price supports. Free trade may not destroy the Fijian sugar industry entirely, but could cut its output as soon as less-expensive sugar from other countries underbids it in foreign markets. In Fiji, as in many other poor countries, cutting back a major export industry could devastate the entire national economy.

Many Fijians want the islands economy to diversify, and to became less dependent on a sugar crop that may have a dim future. Some are betting on tourism to take up the slack. And tourism is growing, though its revenues are not reaching all Fijians. But others argue that farming, with its high demand for labor, cannot be easily replaced by hotels and scuba diving instructors, and that the loss of one lucrative crop like sugar might best be replaced by another crop. Farmed fish could be that crop. And if the fish is raised without pollution and without expensive feed, so much the better.

Late into the night, back in the dining room of the Montfort Boys' Town, Gunter Pauli and George Chan were doing calculations. They needed financial projections to fill out paperwork for UN University and other possible partners. Chan pointed out that chickens require little space, and the structure planned for Montfort will hold 4,000 of them, producing about $20,000 a year for the school. Two fish ponds will add about $10,000. The methane will sell for about $5,400, and the pigs for about $15,000, depending on the ups and downs of prices and production. With $10,000 from mushrooms and another $1,500 or so from the floating hydroponics gardens, the boys and their teachers could gross over $60,000 a year.

The Bank of Hawaii puts Fiji's per-capita income at $2,250 a year. If George Chan has his way, the school will receive an equivalent of the yearly salaries of 25 average Fijians to supplement its budget, and the water over the Fijian coral reefs will be a little cleaner.

Hal Kane is a former research associate at Worldwatch, and is now director of the National Indicators Program at Redefining Progress, a public policy group in San Francisco.