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Helping farmers maximize Soil Fertility – sounds about as interesting as watching grass grow – but today an expert from Florida was in Belize warning farmers about the hazards of using the wrong chemicals on their crops. Dr. Terrence Fullerton says using the wrong chemicals on soil can meaningfully affect the quality of the produce you consume and the health of the waterways across Belize.

Dr. Terrence Fullerton,
“Productivity in the Caribbean region is not as good as we would like it to be. It is not as competitive and there are many problems that need to be addressed. One of them is plant nutrition. People have been using fertilizers more or less based on guess, based on what other people say and very often they don’t get the type of results that they should. Sometimes they end up with poor quality because of the wrong fertilizer, their costs are up because they are using wrong fertilizer. What is becoming more and more important is that they can create pollution problem, polluting rivers, polluting streams, polluting the sea, polluting the ground water with high nitrate which is deadly, it’s toxic. So we’re trying to introduce a program where farmers will be able to make more scientific decisions; choose their fertilizers properly, use them properly.”

Twenty farmers are being trained and the course is being held in Belmopan.