Hmong farmer tries to growing papaya and Guava fruits in Fresno, CA

[cwjmem]

Tus yawg no puas yog koj na, Phwvnyawm!!!!

It will be awesome to see this famer grow papaya fruit in the central
valley!!! I think if he can foil crops from the the 3 months of
falling temperature in California's central valley, he will have
plenty of fruits to sell.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-hmong-farmer-20111114,0,5801613.story

By Diana Marcum, Los Angeles Times

November 13, 2011, 5:53 p.m.
Reporting from Fresno—
In a different country and different language, Pang Chang's father
told him that if he wanted to survive year-to-year, grow vegetables.
But for long-term fortune? Plant trees.

So in the flat, open Central Valley, where the summers burn and the
winters can bring freezing snaps, Chang grows mangoes, papayas, 20
varieties of guava — some never before cultivated in the U.S. — and
jujubes. Not to be confused with the jelly candy sold as movie snacks,
jujubes, or Chinese dates, are honey-sweet fruit little known outside
Asian communities.

To walk Chang's orchard is to enter a dense, glossy, green world.
There is a thick hush, the air as fruit-scented as a shop selling body
lotions. Snaking up and circling the tree trunks are vines, lemon
grass and herbs that have no name outside the Hmong language.

But a farmer can't stick just any non-native trees into California's
fertile earth and expect them to flourish. The secret to Chang's
incongruous crops is in the friendship between a determined farmer and
an agricultural researcher from his homeland, Laos.

Chang and Michael Vang know all about the difficulties of
transplanting to a different world. Together, they figured out how to
grow exotic fruit where people said it was impossible. Along the way,
they accomplished other seeming impossibilities: Chang sent his
children to college. Vang escaped the nightmares that often had him
waking up screaming.

Almost every Hmong immigrant has a harrowing story. Some speak freely
of the past; some never tell. But the broad outlines of their
experiences are the same: The CIA recruited the mountain tribe to
fight in a secret Laotian front of the Vietnam War. When Saigon fell,
the Hmong were hunted and killed. They traveled through the jungle,
trying to cross the Mekong River into Thailand.

Vang is one who tells his story — of a starving 7-year-old, a rifle on
one shoulder and a grenade in his pocket. Ahead of him on the jungle
trail, someone had chopped a poisonous, 3-foot-long centipede in half
to clear the way. But Vang stepped on the head, and the venom went
through him.

"I told my mother: 'I can't walk. Just go with the other family and
leave me.' But my mother walked a half-mile with my little brother on
her back to the next camp, walked back and put me on her back and
carried me. For three days she continued like that through rain and
soldiers."

Like many Hmong who made it to the U.S., Vang's family settled in the
Central Valley, where they could continue the only kind of work they'd
ever known: farming.

Vang grew up helping his family raise vegetables — and hated it. But
as an adult he circled back, studying agriculture and landing a job
with the University of California's Cooperative Extension, a program
that aims to use scientific research to solve community needs.

In Fresno, the cooperative educates Hmong farmers about safety
regulations, pest control and marketing; it also teaches them how to
navigate a complex and unfamiliar government system.

Farm advisors also research plants, taking trips to Laos and Vietnam
to bring back the latest varieties to try out in their experimental
gardens. They were the ones who figured out that papaya doesn't ripen
in the Central Valley — but that there's a need for green papaya: Thai
salads. The Fresno County Farm Bureau credits such research with
boosting the number of crops grown in the area from 300 to 500 in the
last five years.

It was at the cooperative's workshops that Vang met Chang. The farmer,
it was clear, was a tireless worker who constantly experimented,
taking every bit of research the co-op advisors could give him and
trying it in his fields. He risked investing in expensive trees,
gambling on producing guava that he could sell for $3 a pound.

Relying on Vang to translate technical agricultural research, Chang
figured out how low temperatures could drop before his fruit was
harmed and how thick the plastic on his temporary hothouses must be.

When Vang was looking for ways to introduce crops traditional to his
homeland to a broader market, Chang took his fruit to community events
with food booths. They found that guavas sell well to people from
Mexico, and that customers whose cultural backgrounds are far removed
from Southeast Asia like jujubes as well.

If a tree did well in the research gardens, Vang would tell Chang, who
would plant a row. If that row did well, he'd plant three more. If a
tree didn't do well in the research garden, Chang would plant a single
one and start experimenting on how to make it happy.

[Tony]

Tej qhov le nuav yog Moob le kev nrhav, yog ua le caag ho tseem yog
"luas" le kev qha tawm rua suavdlawg pum hab. We have spend too much
time focus our eyes on the fruit and lost focus on the root, what is
wrong with our way of thinking?

[phwvnyawm]

Yawg Cwjmem,

> Tus yawg no puas yog koj na, Phwvnyawm!!!!

Tus hmoob no yog ib tug txheeb ze kuv cov neej tsa los mas........yawg
thaj txiv Cuab thoj kuv twb tau mus de 1 -2 zaug lawm nawb.
Tiam sis mus de thaum tshuav cov ntxaib lawm xwb......vim tsis xav mus
de thawj-j phaum yuav cia rau yawg muag......kuv tsis paub tias ua cas
cov txiv tsis qab li peb cov nyob sab qab teb.....tej zaum nyob Fresno
no dhau ces cov txiv thiaj tsis qab zib heev.......peb cov nyob sab
qab teb cov txiv Cuab thoj qab npaum nyob nplog teb laid.