Conservation Agriculture Woes, Part II

Agricultural methodologies that fail are often a result of inappropriateness. Not in the sense that the maize or fertilizer is indecent; rather, the fertilizer may not fit the soil, the seed may not fit the climate, the plant turns out to be the favorite food of the local entomology. Many of these are kind of the "Wow! Didn't see that coming." variety, and a decent project will assess and adapt.

The trying times, the ones that really grind your gears, are when mistakes that are totally avoidable are made. A case in point was this past week, when we got reports from about 35% of our conservation agriculture (CA) farmers that their fields had been inundated by the Zambezi's annual flooding. The key word in that past sentence is annual. You see, Western Province is dominated by the Barotse Floodplains (aka the Upper Zambezi Floodplains or buLozi [the place of Lozis]). From it's source near Ikelenge in Mwinilunga District to Lake Kariba the Zambezi flows without human impediment for nearly 500 miles. Consequently, given the unimodal rainfall cycle of Zambia (one distinct rainy season from November to April), that the Zambezi River annually fills the floodplains. The only exceptions are in dry years, such as 2000 or 2005, in which rainfall in the drainage was well below average.

Annual, annually, year-by-year, every year.

In our rush to get CA piloted this year, we allowed site selection to be carried out by our lead contact farmers in each of the six villages with little interference from us. I suspect that lack of interference was a combination of our being outsiders and us having "too many irons in the fire". I alluded in earlier posts that carrying out CA in the floodplains was problematic due to the amount of grass and for the fact that the soil is so rich that CA (conserving nutrients) doesn't really make a lot of sense. I neglected to mention the reasons why the grass is so thick and the soil so rich; plenty of water and silt deposition from ... guess what? ... annual flooding.

I'm not sure why these sites were selected by the lead farmers, who have lived their whole lives within a stone's throw of the floodplains and are consequently very aware of the floods. I'm guessing it's one of two reasons:

1. It could have been a gamble; cassava and pearl millet are planted in the sandy uplands (known locally as "the West Bank") due to their relatively light water and fertility needs. Maize and groundnuts, thirstier and hungrier crops that struggle in the uplands even during relatively wet years, thrive in the floodplain and provide a marketable commodity to the farmers. In a really dry year, they can even hedge against hunger when the millet and cassava performs poorly.
2. Building off #1, gambling is much easier when you're playing with other people's money. The farmers were given the inputs for their lima (0.25 hectares) by our agency; in all cases it was even delivered right to the villages. Though I'm not sure whether these were given freely or on a loan basis, my suspicion is the former; though in the latter case, in Zambia, a "loan" is pretty much a gift, given the history of repayment in this country.

I'm not bitter about this; the ideas and the selection preceded my arrival. However, what I'm seeing is that front-end training and hope for back-end results are simply not enough to carry a project through, i.e., "Do XYZ and the end result will justify the means." In agriculture development, the means are what need to be worked over repeatedly and hard.

Roland Bunch keeps ringing in my ears ... start slowly, start small, and be sure of success ... and don't plant maize in a floodplain.

Beetles, Village Chicken, and Notes on Faidherbia albida

One nice thing about all the rain we've gotten recently is that it appears to have washed away the worryingly large beetles that trundle all over the place. It's not that you are in any danger of them; they seem to wander aimlessly around without a care in the world. However, something about bugs that you can hear walking or that have tangible weight sends rods of ice down my spine.

Unfortunately, I found out they do have scorpions here. Though not as big as they get further south, I have this sick feeling that they will eventually get me. Snakes ... no problem. Spiders ... no problem. Scorpions ... well, think of the tunnels of the old Pitfall! video game. Me and Harry, frozen in our prime.

In other news, I eat something called "village chicken" (kuhu kwa hai) every few days at a local restaurant called Nali's. Village chicken is essentially the extreme spectrum of free-range food; in all my time in rural Zambia, I think I've only seen village chickens fed once. They spend all their days scratching, clucking, and staring at the white man in that vacant way only poultry can muster.

Anyway, Nali's really get some great village chickens. They are the consistency of India rubber and have absolutely brown meat; as far as I can tell, they might have served a tour on the Western Front, doubtlessly staring vacantly across at the German lines. And, though cooked, they never seem to be warm. Ah, Zambia ... the center of the unintentional organic movement.

Last, but certainly nearest to my heart, are the Faidherbia albida, the lovely mikona trees. Staring across the green swath of floodplain, it has become easy to distinguish the mikona, as their deciduous habit renders them starkly bare against the skyline. Also, in most cases, they are the only tree in some parts of the plain. Hard to say why; it may be that by shutting down during the rainy season and the annual flooding of the Zambezi, the trees can withstand the waterlogging.

One other thing I've notice is that the deciduous habit is not uniform. The only trees that are completely or mostly bare are the large, mature trees that have never been pollarded. Trees who's branches have been periodically removed for firewood and have consequently sent out new branches appear to retain their leaves on the new growth. This seems to be independent of the trees' age; thick-trunked trees that have been pollarded still have leaf growth on their new branches. I need to spend a day canvassing the seepage (the edge of the plain) to see if this is the case.

It's a testament to the wonders of Nature, this great obdurate column of truth that is life ... I've been looking at this tree for almost four years and have reached the "beginning of wisdom" ... that is, there is so much we don't know about F. albida. It certainly makes life grand, having something to wonder at, to marvel over, to invoke the awe we have as children, when the world is a great mystery! Simply to have and to ponder the mystery is to have completion ... or at least for me.

Farmer Innovations in Conservation Agriculture

Talk about rainy-day Sunday ... since the turn of the New Year, Mother Nature seems to trying to make up for the earlier absence of her tears. The local meteorological officer told me more than half the rain we've received since November has fallen since January 3rd.

Doesn't make a whit of difference to my garden; we transplanted into it last weekend and most the seedlings got burned up within days despite the relative moisture. Though I won't call it a fatalistic attitude, I half-expected that to happen and had planted another nursery; in the meantime, I'm heaping all manner of green matter on top of some beds; digging leaves into others; mulching with rice husks on top; throwing the dregs of our roasted groundnuts to attract the flock of pigeons to manure the beds ... something has to work.

Though it sometimes feels like I'm repeatedly throwing things at the proverbial wall to see what sticks, that is something I can afford to do: informal experiments. I ask around to see what others do; I observe; then I wind up and throw. In most Zambian small-scale contexts, a farmer has a tough time doing that for the following reasons:

1. They live hand-to-mouth. As I've mentioned in earlier posts, a farmer is usually quite interested in not dying. When you're in that particular situation, you become almighty risk-averse; consequently, you rely on "destructive" or "primitive" or "antiquated" technologies that have been passed down for generations and "work" rather than adopting "modern" methods that don't offer the same surety.
   
2. Farmers (and this goes for all farmers in the world), despite all the portrayal to the contrary, are not highly individualistic, autonomous yeomen who daily pit their wits and strength against the vagaries of nature. Farmers do engage in a struggle, but their lives are hardly autonomous in this struggle. Indeed, farmers are people, embedded in very complex webs of relationships with their families, neighbors, extension workers, buyers, and so forth. Within that web, there are often bounded social and cultural spaces in which a farmer may operate that often preclude abrupt changes to farming methodologies.
3. Farmers know quite a bit, but have few venues to talk about what they know. In Zambia, a colonial legacy that never lost its grip after Independence is the notion that traditional farmers used "primitive" methods, and that these methods, due to their "low productivity" and "higgledy-piggedly" appearance were no match for modern methods. Zambian farmers have been so brow-beaten with this idea (AND THIS IS IMPORTANT) that they thoroughly believe the methods they use are "useless" and that they have no capability to legitimately self-adapt or innovate a practice because it doesn't stem from what is perceived is "modernity".
   

The other day, our visits to some farmers who are piloting Conservation Agriculture (CA) in communities southwest of Senange provided a case in point on "adaptation". Though I've written about CA in the past, I'll summarize: my agency is sponsoring seeds, inputs, and training to 60 farmers in six villages to pilot CA practices, which are brand-new to this area. I don't really consider this "adoption", per se ... we are essentially subsidizing the farmers to plant one lima (0.25 hectares) to utilizing CA, in the expectation [hope] that surrounding farmers will pick up the technology, whereas pilot farmers will continue and expand their utilization CA.

One problem we've run into that has been a figurative [and literal] Charybdis is the issue of nutrient leaching. We have soils with a very high sand fraction (imagine a beach), and it's capacity to hold nutrients is extremely limited. Like that Plinko game on The Price is Right, the nutrients (including fertilizer) fall quickly downward out of the root zone of plants. The lack of organic matter in fields is a big reason for this; with a minuscule clay content, soils need organic matter to hold nutrients. Consequently, our visits to upland farmers have been somewhat disappointing; despite their following of proscriptions for CA to the letter, we've seen a number of fields with uneven growth of maize.

The other day, we found our exception. One old demonstration farmer in the Lui Valley (a small river which runs roughly parallel to the Zambezi east of town) had a fine, uniform stand of maize on his plot. We quizzed him about what he had done, and it turns out that in the process of digging his planting basins, he predicted that leaching would be a problem, so he went into the forest and collected handfuls of leaves to put in the bottoms of the basins. Consider this: one lima (50m x 50m) contains 55 rows at an inter-row spacing of 90 cm; each row contains 70 basins at an intra-row spacing of 70 cm. 55 x 70 = 3,850 basins. That's a lot of handfuls.

Like the boy named Sue, he got a lot of laughs from lots of folks; some described him as "crazy for doing all that work". No one told him to do it; he stuck his neck out, played the Irish sweepstakes, took a ride on the Handsome, an it worked. Now we might have a potential solution to the leaching in the upland; also, I have an idea for some research to test the methodology using some different fast-growing agroforestry species as a leaf source (otherwise, the forest could take some abuse). However, the real point is we have to promote this farmer's ideas as an example for his inventiveness in the hope it might inspire others to make some small trials on their farms, not only for CA but for anything regarding farming/harvesting. Its a reflection on the idea that the lessons that stick are the ones that are self-taught.

Looks like the rain has quit ... back off to the fields.

Sad times in Western

Hi Mom -

Bad news today ... there were chips in the edifice of Zambia's long peace yesterday. Agitation over the Barotse Agreement of 1964 let to a riot in Mongu yesterday in which a man and a child were reported to have been killed. Rumors are swirling with regards to the actual number; sounds like the town center was a pretty sketchy place to be. My boss, Mr. Mooto, has children and grandchildren in Mongu; he anxiously phoned them in the late morning (as rumors had been swirling around), and we could hear the gunshots through the telephone. Needless to say, he was not fully attentive most of the day. Me and the two other guys, Patrick and Aka, worked on as usual, but there was a pensive air within and without the office.

The riot was partially in response to a visit by the President to the Litunga (King) of the Barotse tribe; there is a lot of disagreement over the interpretation of the Agreement on both sides, and this being an election year exacerbates the situation. You see, [the Kingdom of] Barotseland was a protectorate within Northern Rhodesia; when Independence was achieved in 1964, it was predicated on an agreement between the Barotse Kingdom, Great Britain, and the then-nascent government of Zambia. This was and is now known as the Barotse Agreement; within it were a number of conditions regarding relations between the two entities upon their union as the Republic of Zambia.

I can't say much else about it; I've been cautioned by the U.S. Embassy through our Peace Corps staff to limit my discussion of the Agreement or the riots yesterday, as the U.S. has no official stance on the disagreement. Don't worry; there's absolutely no danger here and everyone looks out for me. However, it was definitely a more somber than usual, both yesterday and today. I pray that having received a small taste of violence, people will recoil from it and seek more peaceful resolutions.

It was a fitting coda to the day that while having a beer and watching the sunset, I had a discussion with one of the Somalian guys who run the local halaal butchery. He was genuinely sorrowful over the violence; he told me that though he longs to see his home, the chaos that is Somalia keeps him and his family out; such a turn here worries him to no end.

A bad an end to an otherwise great week; our peanut butter sales hit a new high of K540,000 and we turned a couple of corners towards becoming a self-supporting company. We only have about a hundred more corners to turn, but you have to start somewhere.

Love,
C.T.

The News

I am at somewhat of a loss for words today. My only inspiration came from the unnatural howling I heard (mistakenly) from the direction of the District Hospital compound.

For anyone who's lived in Africa, or at least in Zambia, the wailing that accompanies a death is something that, for lack of a better phrase, follows you to the grave. Unlike the church choirs here, which exhibit the epitome of human voices joined in exultation, funereal wailing is a discordant cacophony of chants screamed aloud ... the nadir of human expression against our fate, spun without our wishes or desires.

The sound of wailing in itself brings back those long months in 2005 after the most recent drought Zambia's experienced. I lived about 200 meters from the rural health centre in Kelongwa Village, and each week brought those howls anew from those mothers' whose children had died as an indirect or direct result of hunger. The bleak stares from hollow-eyed fathers in the half-light of a single solar-powered bulb at a visual component to the sounds. A part of me remembered those months five years ago when I became familiar with the abhorrent realities of death, when life finally became a tangible thing that had value and purpose.

All of this raced through my mind as I went to the guard to ask the origin of the noise. Was it a funeral? Had someone died at the compounds? No, he said ... they have caught a thief in the compounds and they are beating him before taking him to the police.

Oh.

How we lost to the Ransome Victory

The past few days for me have been filled with some measure of strangeness beyond the usual. It all started when I got back from my New Years' weekend in Lusaka. My manager, MM, thought it would be a good idea to use up the remaining sunflower seeds; though it's getting really late in the season, I thought it was a good idea until I found out that we had enough seed for five hectares [!], or about 11 acres.

A year ago last September, my buddy Gereon and I spent a weekend preparing 15-20 acres for a stand of rye. It took us most of that time, the use of two tractors, and considerable physical effort to finish the job. Though this job represents a comparable amount of spatial area, the size of the job is far greater. Key word is tractor ... instead of roaring through the space with a twin plow behind an International Harvester followed closely by a smaller (yet still doughty) Farmall, this job is entirely reliant on both the strong backs of oxen and men.

Despite my misgivings, we mobilized the most easily accessed source of labor: Senanga Prisons. So Thursday and Friday found me in the field with 20 men in ragged green uniforms bearing cane choppers, cutlasses, and machetes, hacking away at the considerable growth of shrubbery throughout the plot. I made some contour markers utilizing some spirit levels mounted on a string between two sticks of equal length, and after knocking back the brush, we marked contour lines and heaped the brush along them (a technique commonly referred as "making trash lines").

I won't comment much on the work other that along with the 20 prisoners, there was a guard who kept a bored watch over the group with an "exhaust pipe" (an AK-47) strung over his shoulder. The men didn't say much; mostly they hustled along, as two "captains" (higher-ranking prisoners) kept hollering at them to hurry up: Angufe! Angufe! Aliyeni! (Hurry! Hurry! Let's go!), brandishing homemade batons to keep them moving along. I wasn't uncomfortable in there midst; actually, they seemed taken aback that a boss, especially a mukuwa, was working as well (I chopped the corners and boundaries). When clearing brush on Friday, one man spoke with me ... he said the prisoners had seen only a few white people, as most of them were from Shan'gombo, the isolated district across the Zambezi to the west of Senanga.

It wasn't until this afternoon that we found out what the next stage of preparing the land (plowing) would cost; the gentleman PMu took to the farm on Saturday decided to come up with a really atomic calculation for use of his oxen; 20 steps by 50 steps (about 1,000 meters square) was worth K30,000 ($6.25). Our 50,000 meters square would then run about K1,500,000 ($315) [I should toss my day job and plow!]. PaM was mildly incensed; he knew the guy had boosted the price because it was for our cooperative, and he figured he could make a killing. Unfortunately, this is a rather common occurence; people think we have money to burn and we can never get a fair price; having a white man around only seems to exacebate the situation. We will break the news to our boss tomorrow, but at that rate (and given the risks inherent in planting this late in the season), I think we'll scale back our plans considerably.

Oh, and if you're still wondering ... the Ransome Victory is the equivalent of the Mauser action when it comes to farming equipment in Africa. A single share plow that can be pulled by either a single or double span [team] of oxen, it was introduced around 1920 and has been almost univerally adopted in cattle-rearing areas of sub-Saharan Africa (the notable exception is Ethopia, which has had a traditional plow known as the zha (sic) for eons beyond counting). Roundly cursed by advocates of conservation agriculture for its creating an enabling environment for extensive farming and soil erosion, the Ransome Victory nonetheless remains the ultimate symbol of advancement for non-mechanized farmers. Hmmm ... it might warrant a Wikipedia page ...

50 kgs ... What is a hectare?

Happy New Years everyone, from the land of sand! We mark time by watching the Zambezi rise; rumor floats down [pardon the pun] from Lukulu that the floods have started in earnest. It's a subtle rise ... the Zambezi winds and twists a great deal, and I suspect much of the flooding is simply a function of the water table rising along with the greater volume of water in the river.

Wanted to take a few minutes to point out another fascinating tid-bit of Zambian agricultural lore that makes life interesting for both farmers and agriculture development types: measurements. In most cases in rural Zambia, commodities produced are measured by volume rather than by weight. The classic example is the 50 kilogram (kg) maize sack; farmers purchase or are allotted grain sacks by the Food Reserve Agency (FRA) that are designed to hold 50 kg of dry maize. The preponderance of maize in Zambian agriculture means that these sacks become the medium of packaging for every other agricultural commodity that is sold: sweet potatoes, paddy [unhulled] rice, sunflowers, groundnuts, and so forth (the loan exception is cotton, of which I'll discuss some other time). However, not all crops are created with the same density as maize; sunflowers and rice, for example, weigh significantly less than maize per unit volume.

What's interesting is that few farmers perceive any of their harvests in kilograms per hectare (kg / ha) [a hectare is 10,000 square meters, or two football fields]; saying that you can increase yields by X number of tonnes per hectare is essentially meaningless. First off, I've never met a farmer with a scale. Second, the idea of weight as a dimension appears to be less tangible than say, a stack of bags of a particular commodity. Third, few farmers have any idea of what a kilogram (or a gram, or a tonne) even is; most farmers in their education have had any opportunity to see anything other than a picture of a scale.

Therefore, I've slowly learned that when talking about yield gains/losses, it is better to utilize the volumetric measurement of 50kg maize grain bags rather than weight. A farmer has a pretty good idea of how many bags of maize / rice / groundnuts / etc. should come off a particular field or paddy, which also gives you some indication of soil fertility. When we get to evaluations of our CF practices, I might push for that measure, as it will give farmers a better valuation of the practice.

That leads into our other question ... hectarage. As I mentioned previously, a hectare is the size of two football [soccer] fields, or 10,000 square meters. There are infinite ways to come up with a hectare: 100m x 100m; 20m x 500m; 10m x 1,000m; 50m x 200m; and so forth. Now imagine you are a farmer with limited access to a GPS, cadastral equipment, measuring tape, and so on; then try stepping out (i.e., pacing) 100, 500, or even 20 meters. It gets a bit tricky, especially given all the tall grass, snakes, holes, etc. Furthermore, I have yet to see a field with a straight boundary; they are all manner of shapes and sizes that are determined by rather complex customary or inherited land tenure systems. I still haven't reconciled that one ... however, it might be helpful to rely on the farmer's basic estimates of a given fields yields and work from there.

A friend of mine working in Liberia told me a pretty enlightening story about how farmers estimated the size of a hectare there ... he kept hearing farmers describe widely varying land sizes as "a hectare". Some farmers described 4 hectares as a hectare; others had an inverse relationship, describing a 1/4 of a hectare as a hectare. After awhile, he realized that farmers were determining the size of a hectare based on what they perceived the fertilizer requirements of a given piece of land were. Because farmers received a fixed amount of fertilizer that was designated for use on 1 hectare, they, not knowing that a hectare was, gauged its size based on where they thought their land needed the fertilizer. A farmer with relatively fertile land spread out his fertilizer over a large area and considered that a hectare, and vice-versa for farmers with infertile land.

In summary ... we need to know where they are at before we can start telling them where to go.