Calvin Burges answers John Otieno, J. Alila etc

From: William ODuor.

John,

Thank you for writing such a good letter and I will attempt to answer your questions as complete as possible.

!. The remaining funds to complete the farm have been set aside and are in the bank; the project will be finished. Additionally if more funds are required it will come out of earnings from my other projects or from borrowing funds.

2. The lease will be maintained and the project operated for the full term of the lease.

3. On our pig farm we acquired a respiratory disease in the pigs and approximately 25,000 pigs died within a few days, which required the destruction of the farm, and a subsequent environmental clean-up for the project which is now nearing completion, allowing the farm to be placed back into production for other products. It may be interesting to note that on the pig farm I was only a financial partner, not the operations partner, yet we stepped in to remediate all problems when they occurred.

4. The first outreach project, the Youth Training Center is fully funded by a foundation for which I am a member of the board of Directors, and as soon as the appropriate designs are complete and the approvals received we shall begin construction. We anticipate this to happen by no later than October of this year. This facility will have a dramatic impact on improving the knowledge and lives of the next generation of children in the area. The project is planned to have 3000 beds and operate each month of the year to train as many young people as possible. It will also be utilized to teach specialized groups as women’s groups, farm technology, and health education. Several major Universities from around the world will be helping in this venture.

The second outreach project is related to the community farm projects where on a voluntary basis groups of land owners of contiguous plots can come together to form a co-operative all as envisioned and in accordance with Kenyan law. If this is done and we accept the project to be sponsored by Dominion then the property will be directed by Dominion with most of the work being preformed by the land owners themselves, developing these lands into modern highly productive farms. The land will always be owned by the local people, with the development and operating capitol being provided by Dominion, and the product having a guaranteed market to Dominion. The return to the land owners should make a middle class society from those now living in poverty. Dominion intends to start work on 2-3 of such projects by the end of this year for testing and proving of the concept, after which we believe the demand for this program, will far exceed our ability to develop same. We already have numerous groups of land owners requesting their areas be done first. Dominion will fund the new homes required, equipment needed, inputs required and will be paid for these services over a period of time from the income received from the crops.

5. The methods of farming are conventional modern methods as utilized in most of the modern world. Our fields are operated in the same manner as millions of acres thru-out the US , Canada , Europe, Brazil , Australia , and many other countries. There is no commercial GM paddy rice grown in any part of the world. There are no GM products on our farm and I am opposed to their utilization there. There also is no source of GM paddy rice seed in the world which could even be purchased if one wanted it because it does not exist. The reason people like GM products such as maize, is to control weeds through the use of herbicides. With paddy rice, weeds are controlled by the flooding of the fields. The water kills the weeds and because the rice thrives in water it continues to grow. There is no reason to have GM paddy rice.

6. The seeds we utilize are pure rice and not a hybrid, and definitely not GM. Dominion imported with the approval of the government of Kenya many samples of seeds from around the world, and grew them in a greenhouse to prove up the best varieties. Several of these are no utilized in the growing of our rice.

7. The seed will be new seed each planting and will be provided by Dominion in the Community Farm projects. This is important since the purity of the product is very important. Holding over of poor seed only assures a poor crop the next year. Currently we produce most of the pure seed for cotton, which is given to the government to distribute to the farmers both in and out of our out-grower program, as well as much of the strega resistant maize seed for the country.

8. There are no hybrid or GM products grown on the farm. One thing which may be of interest is that virtually all of the rice we found currently growing in Kenya has the red rice gene in it making it a very undesirable product for purposes of processing and marketing. In most of the world this would be considered a diseased rice and acceptable for animal feeds. Our rice is disease free.

9. I have no idea if GM seed is part of God’s plan for Africa . What I do know is there is no need for GM rice.

10. We have no GM products so none will be sold to anyone.

11. Much of our farm is and will be organic. When the fish farm is complete we will have enough waste from the fish to produce over 7000 acres of purely organic crops. Our fish will qualify as organic and much the crops sold will also do so.

12. The traditional methods of farming now being practiced in the area yield crops of only 20% of their potential. This has nothing to do with the land, but has to do with the technology and resources available, and is keeping the people in poverty. Look around any developed country at the farming practices and you will see tremendous crops, and a working class farmer, living in a modern society. Kenyans should be allowed to have this same standard of living which will only come thru the adoption of technology and change.

13. NEMA has fully accepted and blessed our operations. In fact we are continuously held up as an example to be followed for protection of the environment.

14. The land we acquired was paid for at rates at least double that of the area. All except one family readily took the funds and bettered their life for it. The land was only bought as a buffer area and has not ever been flooded by us, and the person’s land who did not take the funds still has his land.

15. We have never thought of putting questions and answers on the website. Perhaps we should.

16. The farm is only a few months from being financially a commercial success. We have already harvested over 4,000 tons of rice and are planting more each week. The rice mill is fully operational and the products are very well accepted. We can not meet the demand for the rice. It is the whitest, best tasting, most pure product available in the country. It is now time to bring prosperity directly to the local people, not by just giving them jobs but by helping create true wealth from the assets they now have, from their own land. Dominion can not provide all of them jobs and it would be a shame for them to be satisfied with a job paying them a few hundred shillings a day when they can become productive and make many times that from their own resources. It is time that the Luo people be given the opportunity to prosper thru the application of their own labor and reap the benefits thereof or fail if they so chose to do so. I have a lot of faith in them and hope you do as well. If a person wants to eat fruit then first he needs to plant a tree. I hope we can do this together, as there are a lot of hungry and poor people out there. There is no more time to waste.

I hope I have fully answered your questions.

May God bless the Luo people,

Calvin

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"I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they'll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action." MALCOM X