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.