In 1982 I left Ghana, as director of the Food Research Institute, for Cameroon. The next three years were spent researching and gathering information and data on alternative, affordable, manageable and sustainable processes that can be put together to form workable agro-industrial systems for use in Africa.

In 1984 I started experimenting with the organic system of crop production as an affordable improvement to the traditional multiple and multi-story cropping system. Several fruit trees—guava, carambola, sour sop, mango and avocado—were planted in a backyard plot of about twenty meters by nine meters or 180 square meters to which compost was applied.