Growing up in a small village of Sindangsari, in Garut, West Java, some of the best memories from Anton Abdul Fatah’s childhood were the times when he got to play in the mud in his parents’ yard. But today children are unable to enjoy the same simple pleasure.
As the city of Garut has grown so too has demand for bricks to build homes and stores.
Unfortunately for the local environment, brick makers have met this need by renting cheap land in the villages that surround the town and raking the upper, most fertile layer of soil to smelt into bricks.
Brick makers rent land for $7 for a 14-square-meter lot every year — a very small amount of money compared to the profit they make.
Anton said people in his village were happy to rent their land and were glad for the extra money. But now much of the land is degraded and infertile.
“Some of these lands were scraped up to two or three meters deep,” the 29-year old said. “It was really worrying, and nobody knew what to do about it.”
Now Anton busies himself showing his neighbours how to rehabilitate their land and has managed to turn a profit out of a waste bank that creates compost from organic waste.
Three years ago people laughed at the pilot waste bank he started on his parents’ land, but today villagers in two subdistricts are happy participants in the scheme.
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If they sell to me, I won’t immediately give them their money, but I tell them I will pay for their children’s school expenses or their wives’ delivery
Anton Abdul Fatah, Indonesian ‘agro-preneur’ and project leader of Garut Waste Bank
The Garut Waste Bank project has turned Anton into a famous “agro-preneur.” In 2011, he was one of the speakers for TEDx Bandung, a participant at the Young Leaders Summit in Bogor and a finalist at the Greenovation Award.
He also won an E-Idea Award and received funding from the British Council for the project. In 2012 he was the world champion in the Social Impact Finance Forum in Madrid, Spain.
The agroforestry project to reclaim land’s fertility began in 2009 when Anton and his friends started collecting agricultural and cattle waste. The idea of having a waste bank was new and drew the derision of some of Anton’s neighbors.
But through the scheme Anton was able to able to produce very cheap organic fertiliser. In the first year, they produced more than six tonnes of compost and earned about Rp 12 million ($1,044). Each year they employed more farmers and produced more compost.
Last year, the waste bank sold more than 50 tonnes of compost and earned Rp 100 million rupiah.
The snowballing international recognition that Anton has received has helped in convincing farmers in his home town about the program.
After a lot of hard work Anton was able to build a proper compost center and establish other programs for wood crafts, cattle and seeds, which now help to fund the waste bank.
Anton has found leather puppets and dangdut music to be effective tools to transfer knowledge to local farmers, despite initial intransigence to his ideas.
“I did face a lot of rejection from local farmers,” said Anton, who is often seen in his ikat headgear, as inspired by his idol, the master of puppets Asep Sunandar Sunarya. “You just have to make a personal approach, there’s no other way.”
After now having received many visits from students who want to learn from the Garut Waste Bank project, Anton wants to establish a center of education for reclamation in Garut.
The center will host an on-site science class to teach about sustainable farming in the field, production of organic farm products, as well as promoting tourism.
“Combined with Sundanese culture — the music, the dance, and organic cooking — Garut will make a great destination for ecotourism,” he said.
According to Anton problems can be turned into advantages, and monetised. To him the biggest challenge is changing perspectives.
Anton also said that most people cannot prioritise correctly. They will happily spend Rp 50,000 on a T-shirt, but are reluctant to pay Rp 75,000 for monthly school expense.
He tries to teach financial management to local farmers by encouraging them to start a savings account. By buying their wood, Anton is indirectly becoming their financial manager.
“If they sell to me, I won’t immediately give them their money, but I tell them I will pay for their children’s school expenses or their wives’ delivery,” he said.
Gracia Paramitha, cofounder of the Youth Entrepreneurship Program, said that Anton represents a new generation who see environmental problems as business opportunities.
Anton has no educational background in environmental or agricultural science. He graduated from the Indonesian State College of Accountancy (STAN) and is now an employee at the Directorate General of Tax. But his self-taught approach to agriculture has taken him a long way.
Anton and his friends in Sindangsari started out on their research on how to rehabilitate the local land by visiting experts from the Bogor Institute of Farming and the Bandung Institute of Technology, and reading a lot of scientific journals and National Geographic magazines.
Looking to the future Anton hopes big cities and towns will not always harm the environment of the surrounding suburban areas.
He finds that the land degradation is a common problem in suburb areas, and said that the brick industry should start doing their own reclamation project.
“They can scrape the soil because we know buildings need bricks, but it should be limited so as to be sustainable,” he said.
Anton is still keeping his post at the Directorate General of Tax as a day job. He insists that what he mainly does is delegate tasks to people in his home village, who were previously unemployed high school dropouts.
Anton himself is happiest when he sees his plants grow. After spending his days in Jakarta he likes to return to Sindangsari over the weekend to do a bit of gardening.
