Improved Seeds
Quality Protein Maize

Tree Crops
Mango
Avocado
Citrus
Bamboo
Grafting

Vegetable & Tuber Crops
Tissue Culture
and Minisetting

Economic Gains

Nutritional Benefits

Agricultural Education

Protection of the Environment

Advantages of Grafting: Grafting fruit trees enables you to clone the commercial qualities of a particular fruit variety on another tree - whereas the quality of the fruit from trees grown from seed can be highly variable. Also, grafted trees come into production much earlier than trees grown from seeds - they usually bear fruit within 2-3 years, whereas in the case of trees grown from seed you have to wait 5-10 years before harvesting.

Grafting fruit trees, little known in Haiti in 1985, has today become a preferred propagation technique for fruit trees.

Production ORE uses two major grafting strategies - nursery production and top-grafting trees in the field:
Nursery production makes it possible to produce large quantities of seedlings in plastic bags and graft them with commercial varieties. These seedlings are then distributed to farmers for planting in the field and around the home. Top-grafting is the technique used to transform existing low-quality fruit trees, by pruning them and then grafting them with commercial varieties. This activity is implemented by teams of locally trained grafting technicians who go from one locality to another, grafting the farmers' trees. Top-worked trees generally bear fruit with the grafted varieties during the next one or two seasons.

Grafting, which was little known in Haiti before 1985, has been extensively disseminated through training sessions.

Top-Grafting can be used to safeguard the environment:
Low quality trees, grown from discarded seeds, are found in abundance throughout the countryside, but their fruit has little commercial value. It is estimated that less than 25% of Haiti's fruit trees are of acceptable commercial quality. Low quality trees are being systematically cut down for sale as fuel and wood products with devastating effects on the environment. Top-grafting these trees is a very effective method of transforming them into commercial quality fruit trees. The high income from the sale of the fruits, generally protects top-worked trees from the widespread tree-cutting that has devastated Haiti's ecology. They provide an important source of revenue and at the same time help to safeguard the environment.  

The photos above demonstrate the fate of a noncommercial mango (left)that was turned into charcoal and a similar tree (right) that was transformed by the project’s top-grafting program into a lucrative asset for its owner. This emphasizes the environmental as well as economic value of providing farmers with improved tree crops.

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Grafting

Mango

Avocado

Citrus

Bamboo