Timberland Commits to Plant Millions of Trees in Haiti

Today global outdoor lifestyle brand Timberland announced a new commitment to plant 50 million trees around the world by 2025 as part of its pursuit of a greener future. Haiti is one of six initial target countries, and tree planting efforts there will be led by Timberland's longtime partner, the Smallholder Farmers Alliance (SFA). Additional partners helping with the international 50 million tree goal include GreenNetwork, TREE AID, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, Connect4Climate - World Bank Group, Justdiggit, Las Lagunas Ecological Park, Trees for the Future, American Forests and Treedom.

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Trees Bring Cotton Back to Haiti

Although it all started with trees, the story jumps forward to rumors which began circulating on July 18th that something important was happening behind an iron gate in the Haitian city of Gonaives. Neighbors spoke of large bags, said to be filled with cotton, being unloaded next to a machine that several other people had seen delivered the day before. A few days later word went out that the machine behind the gate was ginning cotton. Not willing to rely on rumors, people began to peek through the gate and indeed, there it was. For the first time in over 30 years, Haitian-grown cotton was being ginned.

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Women Farmers Transforming Global Agriculture

Close to half of all farmers throughout the developing world are women, but gender alone denies them equal access to resources. Given the right support, smallholder women farmers will take a leading role in transforming global agriculture and achieving food security. I explore this premise in “Half the Sky, Half the Land,” an illustrated version of the talk I gave at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Toronto last November. Please check it out by clicking on the image above.

Digital Champions for Haiti

Columbia students from top clockwise: Hyo Jin Kim, Jimmy Lee, Numwa Srimontha, Nitin Magina
and Ran Ma next to SFA agronomist Joseph Piterson (right) gathering data from a Haitian farmer
using the new app on a tablet.

by Hugh Locke and Atlanta McIlwraith

Five Columbia University students who hail from China, India, South Korea and Thailand deserve the designation ‘digital champions’ for designing a revolutionary new app to help smallholder farmers in Haiti, and eventually other parts of the world. What makes this app so unique is that it is designed to help small-scale family farmers become more productive at the same time as measuring the precise impact of each farmers’ crops on increasing food security, improving the status of women, and combatting climate change.

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Harvesting Cotton With Impact

REPRINT > by Allison Spahr, Timberland Blog

In partnership with the Smallholder Farmers Alliance (SFA) we are on a five-year mission to bring cotton farming back to Haiti, an initiative that will create significant growth opportunities for Haiti and its communities and plant millions of trees in the process. We recently sent a team of people down to Haiti to help with the first commercial cotton harvest the country had seen in 30 years. Let’s hear a first-hand experience from our very own employee, Allison Spahr.

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How Trees Secretly Talk to Each Other

REPRINT > BBC World Service, REEL

Trees talk and share resources right under our feet, using a fungal network nicknamed the Wood Wide Web. Some plants use the system to support their offspring, while others hijack it to sabotage their rivals.

Celebrating Haiti's First Commercial Cotton Harvest in Three Decades

Timberland and Smallholder Farmers Alliance representatives join local farmers to celebrate Haiti's
first commercial cotton harvest in 30 years. Photo credit: Thomas Noreille / SFA.

Last week three representatives of global outdoor lifestyle brand Timberland joined smallholder farmers in Haiti to pick cotton as part of Haiti's' first commercial cotton harvest in 30 years. Since 2016, Timberland has partnered with the Smallholder Farmers Alliance (SFA) on an initiative to reintroduce cotton farming -- once the country's fourth-largest export crop -- to Haiti. The recent harvest was a key milestone in the project, which aims to create a new sustainable supply chain of organically grown cotton while simultaneously providing social and environmental benefits to Haitian farm communities.

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Exporting Haitian Cotton Expertise to Puerto Rico

Paving the Way for a New Natural Fibers Industry

SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO, December 20, 2018 – A study released today draws on the recent reintroduction of cotton to Haiti by the Smallholder Farmers Alliance (SFA) as the basis for mapping out a similar scenario for Puerto Rico. Both countries share a history of cotton production that has been halted for generations, and both countries have a tradition of small-scale family farming in need of revitalization. Hurricane Maria in 2017 was particularly devastating to Puerto Rico’s smallholder farmers, and a coalition of local organizations there approached the SFA to share its sustainable smallholder-grown cotton expertise to help with the recovery efforts. The Puerto Rico Cotton Study: Exploring a Smallholder-based Organic Cotton Supply Chain is the result of a collaboration led jointly by the SFA and Visit Rico, with support from Textile Exchange and members of Armonía en la Montaña, an educational non-profit organization in Puerto Rico, and the Mercado Agrícola Natural Viejo San Juan.

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