Written by Mike Garratt Aug 17th 2020
The BioSmart project is now well underway and I have met some amazing people, eaten hundreds of arepas (a Colombian street food delicacy) and the project is going from strength to strength, but for this unfortunate COVID interruption mid-way. This is a short blog about how it all started…..for me anyway. I had never been to South America until I was lucky enough to be invited to the RCUK-CIAT Newton-Caldas Fund Sustainable Tropical Agricultural Systems workshop hosted at the Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT) outside Cali in Colombia back in 2017. It was here I met Maria, Jill and Andrew and many great people from CIAT and we have been working on BioSmart ever since.
BioSmart as a project kicked off with ‘Phase I’ in Spring 2018. As a team we had set ourselves an ambitious pilot study to visit farms and farmers in Caquetá in southern Colombia to survey invertebrates and plants, and interview farmers. As soon as we met with Miguel Romero Sánchez and his team at CIAT and prepared to fly south to Florencia, we knew we were in safe hands. And in good company, for Luis Miguel Hernandez, an entomologist from CIAT was going to be working with me during fieldwork. I was leading the entomological part of the project and the plan was to sample invertebrates in different habitats across the farms involved in the Sustainable Amazonian Landscapes (SAL) project.
But keen entomologists among you will know there are many ways to ‘sample invertebrates’ and this was a big unknown for us – what was going to be the best way to effectively collect and compare insects communities across these farms? I had seen some photos and maps but had never been there before. So, with the old scout motto ‘be prepared’ in our heads, myself and Luis Miguel went armed with sweep nets, pan traps and Malaise traps to see what we could see. To our delight, at the first farm we did a trial run of sweep netting in the pasture and within minutes our nets were crawling with invertebrate goodies. So, sweep netting it was then!
And this has been a core survey technique for us on the project ever since. Sweep nets do not work too well in the forest plots so for this we employed the trusty Malaise traps kindly lent to us by Yardany and his team at Universidad De La Amazonia. With the truly expert help of Darlinson, Eric and Lady we had the Malaise traps up across the farms in no time – but what made things even easier, and a whole lot more fun, was the help we had from the farmers to set these traps up. They were genuinely interested in what we were doing and to be honest, I think they were quite happy to come along and show off their beautiful farms to us, particularly the ‘montaña’ where we were installing the traps. With everyone’s support Phase I of the project was a great success and provided the solid foundation on which we have been implementing Phase II, which began in 2019. It was a privilege to go back and share our project findings with the farmers in Caquetá last year before we started Phase II, which has been great fun so far too. What an amazing bunch of people they are!
This leads me to what has been the best experience of working on BioSmart and that is the people I have met in the UK and Colombia. The team at CIAT, the Uniamazonia, CIPAV and all the farmers involved the SAL project have made us feel super welcome, been really supportive and we have managed to achieve an amazing amount in such a short time. My new Colombian friends even found the time to show me the culinary delights of Colombia – I am a very greedy person so this has been a real treat for me. The home cooking we have enjoyed provided by our hosts on the farms was great….the traditional street food like arepas are awesome…..I ate ants for the first time……..and even Colombian specialities like mondongo are delicious – is there a better way to eat tripe…I don’t think so!
Thanks Biosmarties, and looking forward to seeing everyone again soon.
