Vetiver System and Pollution Control - The Vetiver "Bio-Lung"

This image shows  how you might view vetiver  as a "lung" or "gill" when grown on a pontoon on a effluent pond or a highly polluted body of water, or as the key plant in a constructed wetland.  This vetiver bio-lung has been shown under many research and field situations to remove polluting nutrients, heavy metals, agricultural chemicals (fertilizers and pesticides), BODs, and most recently antibiotics.  

Stephanie Smith from Michigan Tech writes" “We wanted to see if the vetiver would uptake antibiotics, because if you give these antibiotics to cows, 70 percent is excreted in active form,” Smith says. “We worry about them leaching into the groundwater, getting into drinking water and compounding the problem of antibiotic resistance. At the end of the 12-week study, all of the tetracycline and 95.5 percent of the monensin had disappeared from the hydroponic solution. Tests showed that the vetiver had taken and metabolized both drugs up into the plant tissue. The results are preliminary, but they show that vetiver holds promise for remediating antibiotics in wastewater".  Nice work Stephanie!!  

I have previously posted on this blog how vetiver can clean up urban waste water and sewage - just a couple from a number of posts on the topic.

Earlier research by Sylvie Marraci has shown that vetiver will take up and break down atrazine.


I was watching a PBS program about frogs and their threatened extermination due to chemicals.  In my area the Puget Sound fishery and salt water marine life are threatened by antibiotics, birth control hormones and a host of other human generated chemicals, all ultimately effecting humans.


In India millions of dollars are being spent to clean up waste effluent that pours daily into India's large rivers.  Most of these funds are wasted, and do not deal with the original source of the waste.


Vetiver has  great potential for reducing the chemicals in waste water - particularly close to source where the scale is manageable.  It would be good if the many companies advising and helping to spend tax payers money were to look at some slower cost solutions such as the Vetiver System.  Particularly in poor countries.

Vetiver System under dry and wet climates - Share your experiences

 There are two Picassa gallery sites that I follow quite closely.  The first is Tony Cisse's site - Vetiver Senegal Public Gallery  Tony farms and develops vetiver in Senegal's driest area - Cap Verte (200 mm rainfall).  His blog is both interesting and informative.  He uses VS to support on-farm production and for off farm applications.  He has loads of experience and is happy to share his ideas.

The other gallery is Yoann Coppin's who lives and works in high rainfall Madagascar. Yoann has been awarded contracts for railroad cut and fill stabilization, and pollution control and water clean up.  He is also a great community man and has many small farmers growing vetiver as a marketable enterprise.  He demonstrates that if the demand can be created the small guys are responsive and can produce high quality plant material  Yoann preaches QUALITY - QUALITY - QUALITY!!  You can see this in his planting of the railway slopes in northern Madagascar.

Vetiver Hedgerows and Training in Haiti

Criss Juliard, a TVNI director, has recently been helping to train Haitians in the Vetiver System.  Criss has a wide experience in Vetiver System applications, particularly in Madagascar - a very similar climate and conditions to Haiti (extreme rainfall, high incidence of deforestation, and major erosion problems).

Here are some of his photos.  From top to bottom:

An 8 month old hedge has already held back 15 cm of sediment, and is starting to create a natural terrace.

Teaching Haitians how to plant vetiver correctly - across the slope and close spacing.  His students learned quickly.  Notice the good quality planting material.

Students planting a vetiver hedgerow on steep land

Vetiver under partial shade, good for landscaping and boundary demarcation

This roadside vetiver was used as a source of plant material

If others would like to share their vetiver photos please send them to me.  We will shortly establish a photo gallery focusing on Haitian vetiver.

Dick Grimshaw

Young Haitian helping his community through the Vetiver System

Gilbert Belneau is a Haitian and comes from and lives in the village of Cazal – which is in the Cabaret area of the Artibonite region of Northern Haiti. For the past year he has been helping his community with land related erosion problems and has learned to use the Vetiver System. In the photo on the left is an example of a gully that he hopes to fix with vetiver.  Below is one of his early plantings across an eroding road fill - looks well planted.  Gilbert and others like him will, if supported properly and encouraged are the hope of the future in restoring Haiti's denuded lands and improving its agriculture.

In the past there have been many consultants (expensive ones!) who have visited Haiti who claimed that erosion was a natural phenomenon and since it was very expensive to solve, bilateral agencies, NGOs and government should focus on income earning activities even if they were not sustainable. I am sure that there are many Haitians who realize that reafforestation has been mainly a wasted effort and must be really upset  once they learn that a technology such as the Vetiver System is the first and very necessary step if reafforestation is ever to be successful.  If I was a Haitian I would feel tricked by NGOs, government projects and donors into planting trees, spending billions of dollars on useless reforestation that has had no visible impact over the last 30 yrs, and yet no reforestation project ever mentioned their Vetiver was good for soil erosion.

This phenomena is not just confined to Haiti.  I have seen the same in many developing tropical countries where Forestry and engineer controlled Soil Conservation Departments have  deliberately rejected and ignored the Vetiver System because it was not what they were trained in and often not on their agenda.  Some of the multilateral development agencies have been just as blinkered and ignorant (no wonder, they hire the wrong staff and consultants to deal with these pressing and very difficult issues!)

Dick Grimshaw

MORE ON VETIVER AND FORESTRY

There is an old pineapple plantation in Thailand that was abandoned and completely denuded.  The Royal Development Project Board used the area as an example of how Vetiver System could be used as the primary tool for forest regeneration.  The area was treated with vetiver hedgerows in 1994, or thereabouts.  I understand that today the 60 ha is now totally reforested, with little evidence of vetiver - that has done its job. See images (1996) when the vetiver has been in the ground for a couple of years.  The small pond remained full year round because of the water recharge due to Vetiver.

TREES DO NOT STOP EROSION ... VETIVER DOES

Billions of dollars and billons of hours of labor have gone into reforestation in poor countries - most has been wasted and the results are very limited. Trees by themselves do not stop erosion.  Once a forest is established after 20 or 30 years the forest stops erosion and retains rainfall and assures that water is released slowly so that generally flooding does not occur.  Creating a forest is the difficult part.  We know that if vetiver hedgerows are planted across denuded slopes in the first instance, then the microclimate changes (better soil moisture conditions) that allows for trees to be planted between the rows (in the second or third year).  these trees grow well and the first steps to creating the forest will have been achieved, whilst all along the vetiver hedges are protecting the land and doing waht a mature forest is able to do later.  A good example of this is Don Miller's catchment conservation in Vanuatu, South Pacific. Another example is the rehabilitation of the "red desert" in Guangdong Province, China.  In this case some 500 ha of completely eroded hillside (only "C" horizon remained - top image) was first treated with vetiver hedgerows. Two years later Eucalyptus sp were planted between the hedgerows.  After 5 years the area was looking like a forest again.

Another case was in HongKong, very badly denuded granite hillside was first protected with vetiver and then successfully planted with Acacia mangium. We recommend that our forestry friends take note of this, and by the way if they want to grow better quality tree seedlings they would be well advised to read some of Norman Jones' (one of the great foresters that I had the privilege to know) notes that can be found on TVNI website. They are short, sweet, and very applicable.

Ist Latin American Vetiver Conference - "A green hope"

Carolina Rivas Berrios is the coordinator for the Latin America Vetiver Network and the editor of the blog - Vetiver Latina.  For the past 18 months she has been working on launching a Latin American Vetiver Conference.  With support from TVNI, Paul Truong and our Patron - Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn of Thailand, the conference will take place in Santiago, Chile from October 14 - 16 2010.  Well done Carolina!!  The conference will be an important milestone in the adoption of VS applications in Latin America, particularly as we see increasing interest in the technology in all countries of the region.


Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn of Thailand will attend and participate in the conference - she is well versed in the technology and like her father, the King of Thailand, is committed to seeing the technology extended.  Paul Truong, Jim Smyle, and Roley Noffke, all TVBI Board members and vetiver practitioners will attend, along with leading vetiver specialists from the region. see program 


I highly recommend the conference - it is a great venue for existing and potential vetiver users in Latin America to get together and exchange experiences and ideas.  What you get out of the conference is worth far more than the cost of getting there.


I would ask those of you who know people who might be interested to pass the information about this conference to them.


Other key links: Red Vetiver Latina and Vetiver Latina Blog