With a farming background, a B.S. in Agriculture and training in tropical, desert and urban farming, I decided at age 58 (I am now 79) to put that knowledge to use by forming a charity, Needful Provision, Inc. (NPI), in 1995.
By means of direct assistance and distance education, I have guided Needful Provision to assist smallholder farmers on a global basis to improve their crop production and food security. NPI has several distance education programs under development for a number of developing nations.
Since one-third of all land is desert, and because a reported 820-million people living in or near those many deserts are living on the brink of starvation, I have focused part of my efforts on development of counter-desertification technologies to find better ways to collect, store, and conserve water while using subsurface drip-irrigation and ground covers plus windbreaks to grow food, feed, fiber, niche, tree and green energy crops on desert lands.
As part of that effort, I also developed ways to grow algae in tubes on desert lands for production of algal lipids for biofuels and algal solids for high protein food/feed supplements, plus assorted algal products. I am planning a demonstration project for Kenya to improve intensive, rotational grazing of livestock and wildlife.
I also work to assist refugees, including Montagnard and Hmong political refugee families in North Carolina, to improve their food security and income, training and coaching of minority, disadvantaged and urban refugee farmers to start farming operations. (In Vietnam, the Montagnard people sacrificed greatly to save the lives of many American soldiers.)
Another area of my encore focus has been the development and writing of a survival instruction manual to help volunteers working in hazardous areas. The need is urgent. I served in South Vietnam with another organization, International Voluntary Services (the model for the Peace Corps), from 1959-61 and survived seven assassination attempts during that period. The Peace Corps has had 298 volunteers killed. My survival handbook is posted on the NPI website.
And finally, I volunteer time to assist military historians perfect their accounts of military and paramilitary actions that I participated in. I recently helped a distinguished military historian complete his history of the early Vietnam conflict. Through such efforts, we can discover and learn from our past mistakes, mistakes that were many and horrific in Vietnam.