“We attempt to help out families in the San Lucas area that are the poorest", Ramiro Coche explained, "the ones that do not have any land yet, but want to be farmers and have children. We try to help them get going with farming techniques so their crops produce more.”

Through the San Lucas Parish’s Small Farmer Program, an extension program that grew out of the Parish experimental farm, Granja Juan Ana, families are provided an opportunity to learn farming techniques, including how to develop strong and well designed contours/terraces for farming use and soil conservation, building up the soil with the application of composts twice yearly.

With training in composting and animal husbandry, the Small Farmer’s Program strives to foster the agricultural lifestyle of the Maya.

Composting – Fostering an organic approach to farming, the Parish Small Farmer program promotes a composting program instead of dependence on chemical fertilizers. Working with the people to abstain from burning off the previous year’s corn stalks and – gathering it together with other organic roughage –the Maya philosophy is introduced that ‘what comes from the soil should return to the soil’.

Developing the compost, participants learn to mix in a number of layers: leaves, weeds, husks and stalks in one layer; animal manure on another, a layer of dirt, some lime and a frequent hosing of water to keep the mixture wet, helping to ensure that it decomposes as quickly as possible. In using only organic matter in the pilot gardens, it is possible to get as many as four crops a year with some vegetables.

One goal of the program is to use the waste water from the Juan Ana Coffee project in the composting process, eliminating a waste problem and completing the cycle of nutrients back to the soil.

Animal husbandry – Another area in which the Parish works with small farmers is with animal husbandry, providing small farmers with training and experience. Projects with chickens and rabbits are some of the more popular, providing a source of protein for families affected by malnutrition.

Project Coordinator, Ramiro Coche, explains that if a family raises 25 chickens, using only about half of them, it can eat six eggs a day and gain additional income from selling the others.  As another example, a family raising one buck and four doe rabbits can eat one rabbit a day for two years.

The Program also offers relief for farmers in the area without access to their own land. Traditionally having had to lease land from a landowner nearby or lease from large plantation owners down on the coast of Guatemala, the parish program provides more than 65 families the alternative to farm and harvest 1/2 acre plots of unused Parish lands.