Good Luck to the Senior Octet of the College Preparatory School: Music Speaks 2010 Audition

Dear Blog Followers,

The YouTube video posted above is from the Senior Octet of our school comprising of Jacob Wilson, Aaron Pang, Mitchell Leoung, Tatianna Rosenblatt, Maya Ramachandran, Karli Anderson, and Nick Spears. They are auditioning for the Charity Competition called Music Speaks 2010 and would like to share this video. Music Speaks is a charity concert to raise money and awareness about Autism. The competing groups also get to choose a charity to donate to, and they have chosen Project Jatropha. We are very grateful for their choice, and wish them the best of luck. Once again, many thanks to the Senior Octet.
From,
Project Jatropha Team

How to green your school from Cali to Minnesota

Dear friends,
I am re-posting Adarsha's Oct 6th blog entry from ACE's blog: Hot and Bothered. This will be a great opportunity for us to establish new contacts with environmental youth leaders from all over the USA. Good luck Adarsha!
~Apoorva

How to green your school from Cali to Minnesota

October 6th, 2010 by Adarsha

This month, I’ll be representing ACE at the Green Schools National Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Its goal is to engage high school students and drive them towards making their schools more sustainable.

There is a lineup of some pretty exciting-sounding speakers, including Phillipe Cousteau, the renowned environmental activist who is the voice and face of a lot of environmental education programs delivered online.

One of the programs – the National Youth Summit – focuses as an idea exchange for the youth interested in greening their local schools together and I think that the Green Schools National Conference Leadership Program interests me because I value efforts like this to spur greener schools.

This generation’s youth, through our action or inaction, will have a great impact on social, political, economic, and environmental issues.

It is vital to instill the importance of sustainability and the value of protecting the environment in the youth, who will keep those values and hopefully continue to act on them throughout their lives.

I hope to learn what schools from varying backgrounds can do to help green themselves and the surrounding environments as there is no one-size-fits-all approach to making local institutions more sustainable. By learning the various approaches other students are taking towards sustainable schools and bringing the knowledge I’ve acquired from working with ACE and my own project, I hope to learn about the various paths to sustainability, and help fellow students in their endeavors.

More to come after my trip north and east!

-Adarsha

How Did We Do: Labland Biotechs Perspective and Our Analysis

Dear readers,

As Apoorva wrote, we were excited about the 80 Kg(176.37 lb) seeds that the farmers collected in Thippalapura. However, when we met our Advisory Board members, Dr. Sudheer Shetty and Dr. Geetaa Singh of Labland Biotechs, they were kind of disappointed. According to their expert opinion, it should have been three times the amount that we got. They expected roughly around 525 lb.

Well, when I thought about this, I knew the reason for this difference. When we visited the villages this time, we saw lots of seeds that were on the plant or on the ground. The farmers have not collected all the seeds. The reason for this is, the conflict of time. The harvest time of tobacco and Jatropha overlaps. If we think about it, we know that their first preference is tobacco, that is their main cash crop. That leaves the seeds on their Jatropha plant unharvested. This is a problem that we anticipated, but not to this degree.

Some of the farmers who were adventurous enough to plant Jatropha on their regular land patch told us how much money they lost because of lack of that patch of land for tobacco cultivation. This is true. Jatropha will not reach its full potential for the first two years and if the farmers replace tobacco with Jatropha, they will lose their income for the first two years. This is the reason we are not asking the farmers to replace the only cash crop. We want this to be a slow transition. We want to give this as an option. It will be up to the farmers to decide after two years.

A Stove Run by Jatropha Oil at Labland Biotechs

However, we need to come up with a way to see to it that the farmers collect the seeds that their Jatropha plants' yield. If both plants are to be harvested at the same time, how can we do this? One of the ways we are thinking is encouraging the other family members like kids to get involved. This is where our Global Call to Youth comes in. As we have involved several rural schools in environmental education and tree planting, an idea hit upon us to see if we can ask them to get involved. This is our plan A for the moment. If any of you have other ideas, we are interested in hearing them. Right now, we're definitely open to suggestions.

Some pictures from the global call to youth!

Sincerely,
Adarsha

Finally The Time That We Were All Waiting For----

Dear Blog Followers,

Tuesday, August 10th, was a very cloudy day at our project site. However, that did not bother us as we were too excited. That was the day when the farmers from Thippalapura sold the collected dried Jatropha seeds from the project site to us! We were eagerly waiting for this day. We wanted to show the farmers that we meant what we had said two years ago. We would buy the seeds that they collected at the market price. Here are some of the pictures of the entire process.

One of the farmer leaders took the initiative of establishing a rural seed bank. He had established a very interesting protocol . Instead of each farmer selling the seeds to us independently, he convinced them to work together. The farmers took the collected seeds to the "Seed Bank" where they were bought for RS.7/Kg. He stored them in a dry place in his home and patiently waited for us to purchase them. They had collected 80 Kg of seeds. We paid Rs. 10 per kg so, he made a profit of Rs.3 per Kg!

Once we reached the "Seed Bank", we realized that we needed a weighing machine! Neither we nor the villagers had a weighing machine. It was no big deal though. We had to make an extra trip to the nearby rice mill in Hunsur, where we used their weighing machine to weigh the seeds. The farmers had collected 80 kg seeds. We were very happy with the amount collected. This was the first transaction that has taken place. This was the first time we bought the seeds from the farmers proving to them that we are in this for a long haul. They were very happy and we were very excited to buy the seeds.

The next step was to take the seeds to Labland Biotechs to extract the biofuel. We transported the seeds to Labland Biotechs. There, they will first determine the amount of oil content in the seeds before extraction. This time, we are going to get the oil converted into biodiesel and then distribute to the selected farmer leaders to do the test runs. Unfortunately we could not be there for the production of biodiesel because it was time for us to return to CA. We have made arrangements for our farmer leaders to collect the biodiesel from Labland Biotechs through the help of Parivarthana staff once the biodiesel is ready. I will update the results of the test runs once I have the results.

Honestly, we did not expect to see 80 Kg of seeds collected as most of the plants are just one year old. Since it was the first year, we never anticipated any yield, even if they had been pruning the plants as suggested. However, when we reached Labland Biotechs, their reaction was surprising to us. Adarsha will share their perspective in his blog post in a day or two.
~Apoorva

65% Survival Rate for Phase I and Phase II Jatropha Plants

Dear followers of Project Jatropha,

During our recent visit to India this summer (August 2010), we found out that the survival rate of the Phase I and Phase II Jatropha plants was 65%, which is pretty good-higher than I had anticipated. The dead plants were replaced with gap filling-a number which amounted to around 5000 plants. However, when we told Labland Biotechs the survival rate, they were surprised: Labland was expecting a survival rate of around 98%, which is what they had gotten while growing the plants in the field. Earlier, when we got the number of plants that survived from the farmers, they also provided us with the reasons for the plant deaths. In general, the farmers attributed their plant losses to erratic rainfall, which had been happening. However, upon closer inspection of several farmers' fields, this explanation did not quite make sense. We’d see two plots, each containing Jatropha (as a hedge or in the form of bunds), side by side. One plot would have Jatropha plants that were four or five feet high and fruiting (with multiple branches), while the other plot would have fewer plants, and the surviving plants would only be two or three foot high stalks with absolutely no fruit whatsoever. If erratic rainfall had been the cause of the dead plants, then two plots right next to each other should have had similarly sized plants. Labland Biotechs believes that the farmers did not take as good care of the plants as they should have, leading to the decreased survival rates. The plants that were closer to the cash crops of the farmers were the ones that grew better, which makes sense since the farmers would take care of the cash crops nearby. We hope that the gap filling will make up for the lost seedlings.

For Jatropha Plants Survival Data please click here!
Sincerely,
Adarsha

Project Jatropha's goal is not limited to promoting Jatropha cultivation

Dear friends,

Adarsha and I have returned from our India trip. Sorry, we could not blog our adventures as we had no access what so ever to Internet! I remember, last year, I could blog a few times during our stay. This year, as we had only three weeks time, we had to stay put and work at the project site. We have made several interesting journal entries and will be blogging them in the coming weeks. Overall, it was a very productive visit.

Where ever we went, the journalists had one question/concern that we never anticipated. Though we clarified it over and over, I thought of sharing it with you all. The name Project Jatropha often caused confusion in the urban areas. People thought that we were promoting only Jatropha cultivation and we were bombarded with concerns about mono-cropping and its limitations. Actually when we launched this project, we were much younger. This was just a social experiment. We did not have big plans. We thought of trying this out by giving a possible alternative to tobacco cultivation. We never asked the farmers to give up tobacco in entirety. As we initially introduced Jatropha, Adarsha came up with the name Project Jatropha and at that time it was a suitable name. Once the project took off, we did a lot of research on other biofuel sources. We have included Pongamea and are in the process of introducing Simaruba, a novel biofuel plant. We will share more information about this useful plant in a separate blog post. Project Jatropha not only promotes the cultivation of Jatropha and other biofuel plants but also aims to provide environmental education to students of rural schools. We have done massive planting of useful forestry saplings to prevent deforestation involving scores of youth in the villages near Hunsur. This was a great experience. We have planted more than 25,000 forestry saplings involving 33 schools and 300 farmers by the end of this summer. Adarsha and I will blog our individual school stories in the coming weeks. We are very happy that our visit was very successful.
~Apoorva