Founded in 2013, HomelandGreen is a group of Hong Kong volunteers learning to live harmoniously with soil that nurtures all lives. They take part in greening projects and pursue agricultural practices that promote soil health. Their motto, “Be just to the earth, for the good of all beings,” reflects their deep commitment to reversing desertification and land degradation and the environmental threats they pose, climate change and world food security in particular. They have endeavored to educate the public about these serious, growing environmental problems and existential challenges and provide concrete means for the people in Hong Kong to apply the state-of-art scientific researches by taking action.
HomelandGreen, seeing the promise of regenerative agriculture, taken here as "a conservation and rehabilitation approach to increasing the resilience of crops and animals to climate change by strengthening soil health and minimizing water, pesticide, herbicide and fertilizer use, while maintaining productivity", has been striving to promote it locally. While their three-year experiment conducted on local farms has achieved initial success, they have also learned that farmers need access to proper soil amendments and balanced plant nutrients in addition to training in relevant knowledge and skills. Supported by Patagonia through the 1% for the Planet, this project aims to address the former need as their effort to train farmers to produce on-site inputs, in place of costly imported products with high carbon footprint, turned out to be too labor- and logistic-intensive for individual farmers to be sustainable and the difficulty to ensure quality also left much to be desired.
 
|
