Solid, Peru

Solid is an organization that aims to put people in the South on track to take their lives in their own hands. They want to help those people and on term, make their help unnecessary. They do this with hybrid organizations: sustainable joint ventures of responsible commercial entities and social organizations.

The activities of Solid in general focus on handicraft workplaces and agricultural projects. Solid implements its hybrid model in these sectors, namely the fertile collaboration between a fair and sustainable commercial entity on the one hand and a social organization on the other hand.

Solid Agriculture focuses on agricultural projects in Ayacucho, Peru, with the aim to make the farmer families independent. The profit from these projects will be invested in social projects in rural areas. Good examples of such social projects are training adolescents in rural entrepreneurship and co-operation with poor farmer families.

Granja Integral Montefino is the local partner of this project. Montefino is a farm and a training institute for farmers with dairy cattle, who wants to address the demand for quality dairy cattle and helps to improve the cattle breeding in Ayacucho. This farm has expanded to a real integrated and sustainable farm with different animals like cows, pigs, guinea pigs, alpacas… They are producing cheese from their own produced milk and are growing different organically grown crops such as quinoa, cañihua, kiwicha and tarwi. In addition the farm also owns composting production and floriculture. The milk of the farm is processed in their own little cheese factory and is being sold on the local market under the name of ‘Montefino’. The next step is to improve the sales process!

The idea of this project is to develop an integrated and integral stable with various rural activities, like a center for youngsters of the region following a hands-on and very practical approach, a service and knowledge center for the farmers and students in the neighborhood and a lively place people can visit (maybe stay overnight). The local staff who is focusing on milk- and cheese production is well aware of the potential and the idea of agritourism, but don’t have sufficient knowledge or experience to make this work.  

The project can focus on a few objectives, which have to be selected by the students in dialogue with the organization.

• The Montefino stable: a few objectives which can be worked on are the marketing for the products and services of Montefino to increase the sales, the development of dosage and elaboration of a balanced feed for the cows with products of the area, and the management of production information and costing of products and services. Ideas can be developed to make the stable an attractive place to stay for families, students and classes, thus developing agritourism around the stable.
• Familias Saludables (Healthy Family). In this section, there will be worked on improving the living circumstances of poor rural families living in the Andean mountains, by developing, researching, investigating and proposing new techniques to improve their living conditions. For example designing bioclimatic houses to avoid cold or researching how to have good heating in classrooms and houses with local materials.