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

Vegetable and tuber crops
Vegetable and tuber crops currently represent a small percentage of the farmers' production system. The result is low-income agriculture. Vegetable production offers many opportunities to earn substantial income. But Haitian farmers are generally limited by the high risks associated with these crops. They are also constrained by the scarcity of suitable seeds and essential inputs, low soil fertility, and their lack of marketing skills. But these factors can easily be resolved by making seeds and ag inputs available and providing the necessary technical assistance. Tubers such as yams are also high revenue crops, but their production is restricted by the scarcity of plant material. This is due to the low multiplication rates resulting from traditional propagation techniques, but which can be resolved by utilizing rapid multiplication techniques such as minisetting. However, unfortunately, historically little has been done to improve any of these crops and as a result potential revenues have been lost.

Pumpkins and winter vegetables offer interesting opportunities on the local and international markets. New sweet potato varieties such as Tapato (right) produce higher yields than traditional varieties.

Assessing and exploiting market opportunities
The major elements of the high revenue vegetable crop program are market analysis, assessment of production and market risks, selection of crops and production calendars, procurement of seeds, and technical assistance for production, post-harvest, grading and transportation. As previously stated, vegetable production can be highly profitable, but the risks are high. Both local and export markets are volatile, and prone to seasonal and regional overproduction. Buyers are not always reliable. The economic risk to the farmer is one of the primary concerns of our program. To reduce the risks involved, we encourage crop diversification, involving a balanced mix of high-risk crops together with lower revenue, staple crops.
ORE has specialized in the propagation of improved plant material and offers the farmers items such as: yams seeds from minisetting, sweet potato cuttings of the successful Tapato and Toguecita varieties, export quality hot pepper seeds and many others. We also source and supply commercial vegetable seeds to farmer groups. Training is available for participating farmer groups in production, pest management, accounting and marketing.

Marketing Strategy
Marketing is a major component of all three core programs: This involves the creation of local marketing centers for fruit, vegetable, tuber and cereal produce, providing a facility for grading and handling operations prior to distribution to local and export markets. The marketing approach involves contact with exporters and overseas importers, identifying crops offering interesting market opportunities, introducing and multiplying plant material where necessary, providing technical assistance for production and post-harvest.

The following crops have been developed to date:
Hot peppers: West Indian Red, local Ti Bouk
Sweet Potato: Tapato and Toguecita varieties
Calabassa Squash: Panama and Jamaican and local red varieties
Yams: Yellow and Plenbit varieties
Shallots: Local varieties

Post-harvest marketing facilities
The current program wants to promote the establishment of regional post-harvest marketing facilities, offering farmer groups an appropriate environment for storage, handling and grading of their produce. The goal is to coordinate regional production on a large enough scale to attract buyers from the local and international markets.

Hot peppers have been one of the most successful export cash crops of their kind.	Quality seeds and vigorous grading are essential to successful exporting this crop.	Yams are another big potential export crop. Minisetting helps produce quality plant material.

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Improved Seed

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Tissue Culture & Minisett