In the mountain villages of Guatemala’s Western Highlands, farmers are combining ancient Maya knowledge with modern sustainable farming techniques to protect their crops from pests and disease. Smallholders are creating homemade biopesticides using plants with strong smells and flavors to deter pests on their family plots. This is helping to cut back on the use of increasingly expensive agrochemicals, many of which have been labeled as dangerous to human health and linked to soil degradation. About 60 Guatemalan communities in the Western Highland departments of Sololá and Huehuetenango, as well as Chiquimula in the east, are working to revive these traditional techniques with support from the international development organization World Neighbors. Their focus is to restore and strengthen traditional knowledge, combining it with agroecological practices that help families produce surplus food they can sell to boost household incomes. “Traditional farming techniques are becoming popular because they are simple practices to apply, use local resources, and have proven to be effective,” Dayani Roche, a program associate at World Neighbors, told Mongabay via email. Rather than a single ancient recipe, farmers are using “a living combination of ancestral knowledge, local experimentation and more recent agroecological practices,” he said, which are “safer for families, soil, water and biodiversity than many chemical alternatives.” The Maya civilization, which once stretched across modern-day Central America, had a rich history of farming dating back to 2000 B.C.E. Its most celebrated agriculture system is the milpa, a form of intercropping that involves a mix of maize, beans and…This article was originally published on Mongabay

CONCEPCIÓN DE SOLUTECA, Honduras — In the 1970s, the Honduran government granted a piece of land in the mountains of Concepción de Soluteca to Roberto González’s parents. They duly grabbed a chainsaw and a machete to clear the forest. On the 12 hectares (30 acres) they received as part of a land reform, they planted corn, beans and bananas, the basic staple foods. It was a hard life up in the mountains, allowing the farmers and their families to just survive. There wasn’t much public infrastructure, and most children had to help with farmwork early on. This included González, who only attended elementary school for three years. When González inherited the land 20 years later, coffee cultivation was just taking off. Middlemen promised the farmers good money for the export crop, and the banks provided loans for cultivation. At first, this worked well, González, now 39, remembers. Coffee helped the farmers to generate income and improve living conditions. But it didn’t last long. They grew coffee much the same way they did other crops, without adequate soil or shade management. When harvests dwindled, they expanded their area, cutting the last standing forests and damaging water sources. Around 2012, they faced an outbreak of coffee rust, a fungal disease. It was a complete disaster: many farmers were thrown into poverty and forced to migrate. “We destroyed the foundations of our livelihoods, but it was out of ignorance; we just didn’t know better,” González tells Mongabay. Under the EUDR, coffee farmers step…This article was originally published on Mongabay