Ashley Terry Talks about the trip to Malawi Africa for the first phase of the Tiyeni Documentary shoot.

Transcript. 

John
You just got back from Malawi, Africa, which is nuts. Most people don’t go there. You know, it’s not like a big tourist place, although it has a giant lake. I was really shocked at the size of the frickin lake. And that shot that you have from the plane.

Ash
Yes. It is Africa’s third largest lake and it’s a freshwater lake. And nice. Got a chance to go swimming in it. We did manage to take a little bit of a half day off at least to go down there. It was only about 40 kilometers from Mzuzu. And, you know, it was just a really beautiful lake.

John
Nice. Just really quickly, how did the Tiyeni project start? How did you end up creating this documentary? Right.

Ash
Right…So I’ve been working with the Soil Food Web School, whose founder, Dr. Elaine Ingham, until recently lived here in Corvallis. And the Soil Food Web School each year from 2021 through 2023, had a Soil Regen summit. And we would raise money for this charity, Tiyeni. And it was a goal for a while for the board to be able to fund a documentary.

John
All right. So they wanted to do a documentary that finally happened they pulled the trigger and. But what’s the… What’s the point? What’s going on with Tiyeni? What are they doing over there that demands a documentary be made about this group?

Ash
So, Tiyeni is an organization focusing primarily on spreading the word to other Malawian farmers about deep bed farming, which is a process that requires fewer inputs, particularly chemical fertilizer inputs, because it relies on creating a lot of the organic materials that go into compost there on site. So there are just so many things about it that tick regenerative agricultural boxes as well as providing enough food for the farmer to feed their family an extra meal a day, or to become more than subsistence farmers and actually start selling on the market.

Ash
Some farmers are so desperate for this knowledge because they’ve been waiting for a while. They, they, they have to invite the Tiyeni trainers in to their district to make a demand to their local extension planning agency.

John
Oh, interesting. So it has to go through government? It has to be an official like through the government?

Ash
It has to be a request. Yes. And then they call on behalf of that citizenry, say, hey, our farmers want to know this technology, can you send a trainer and they say, yes, but we they also ask an extension planning agent to be there. One of the EPA, they call them personnel to also understand and and be able to communicate further to the rest because it might be one farm to ask, but then everybody else is going to benefit because they’re going to spread out word of mouth.

Ash
They’re going to show it to this EPA person, as well as lead farmers in the village. And again, hopefully people see the success and they want to know more.

John
It’s quite a quite a process, according to the Tiyeni site. And the numbers are quite amazing. It’s a doubling or tripling of yield in the first year, but after five years, it’s more than nine times the profitability on that land. And they’ve got a lot of I mean, they’ve trained more than 30,000 farmers already, but there’s 2 million farmers in Malawi.

Ash
Yeah.

Help us reach our goal

We’re asking for help to distrubute this film. Our goal is $20,000. This will help us finish the documentary, submit the film to festivals, and engage in paid marketing to drive awareness. Tiyeni’s goal is to eliminate food poverty in Malawi and then elsewhere. This documentary is their investment in promotion to raise funds for expansion. Help us end food poverty in Malawi with Deep Bed Farming.