The email came back up today ... must be the satellite shifted and pointed back at us. It's nice to have it back ... there isn't much going on in Senanga (ever) and the national news channel isn't what I would call an extensive global news network; they mostly concern themselves with local issues.
We had a small workshop with the seven Field Extension Workers (FEWs) who are our agents on the ground
for promoting Conservation Agriculture (CA). They are a fun lot; I've gotten to know them over the past seven months, and have quite a bit of respect for them, as they are promoting a relatively strange form of agriculture to an audience that can be rather fixed in their ways. Their job is to get trained in CA spend their time promoting the practices and reporting the results to SDACSS / Concern; they get paid a small stipend to do so (~$75/month). Before you get to thinking "Wow, that puts them way over $2 / day!", keep in mind that they often walk six to eight miles through either floodplains or beach sand to visit both disinterested / interested farmers for the whopping sum of $2.50 / day.
Today, we spent most of the day discussing the basics of soil science, the need for increased organic matter in the soil, and how we could increase that organic matter by integrating local nutrient sources into the proscribed CA systems. These include compost, kitchen waste, animal manure, and in particular, certain tree leaves. It was kind of cool for me; we took the idea of the guy out in Wanyau who put green leaves in his planting basins (achieving a 5,000+ kg per hectare harvest) as a basal dressing and expanded it using agroforestry. Kind of a fortunate turn of events to have a method proven for us in advance; we are simply systematizing the process he tried out, though with some twists. For example, rather than gathering random leaves from the forest, we are encouraging them to alley crop certain trees (Leucaena lecocephala, Gliricidia sepium, Cajunus cajun, and Sesbania macarantha) and utilize those trees as the basal dressing in the basins.
To step back a hair ... the current prescription for CA dictates a set of procedures that appear nearly sacrosanct; no burning of residues, permanent planting basins, no conventional tillage, a specific seed planting rate, etc. It comes across (as so much does in Zambia) as canon; deviation from the script written by CFU or GART (find those for yourselves) is regarded as heresy (read all about it). Today, we were essentially asking our FEWs to move slightly outside the box and experiment with some other basal dressings. Why? Frankly, the price of fertilizer is simply staggering in Zambia, particularly to a rural farmer. For the recommended dose of basal dressing (Compound D, N-P-K: 10-20-10, 6% sulfur) and top dressing (urea, N-P-K: 46-0-0) is 200 kg of each (400 kg total, or 880 lbs.) for one hectare. If the fertilizer could be bought on the open market, it would cost K280,000/50kg, or K2,240,000 total. That's the princely sum of $470 / hectare. CA does not deviate from this recommendation, though to its credit, it targets that fertilizer much better to the crops.
What we are doing is asking the FEWs to consider other nutrient sources, particularly with an eye on boosting the soil organic matter in the sandy soils that dominate the area; this can include manure, leaves, ash mixed with kitchen waste, and so on. As such, we spend the day discussing soil organic matter (SOM), its effect on soil structure, nutrient availability, water storage, etc., and how we might increase the SOM using the above mentioned tree species in some creative ways.
As such, after a couple of planting demonstrations, visits around town to put names-to-the-faces of tree species, we shook out a plan: the FEWS will make three small 10m x 10m plots adjacent to their 50m x 50m CA plots to try three experiments.
I went off the grid a bit, though, with my suggestion that the FEWs design the experiments themselves. The perplexed looks reflected 80 years of one-way agricultural education; we don't come up with ideas ... that's your job. I pointed out that the chap in Wanyau had gone out on a limb dumping leaves in his basins on his own volition, and it was time for the FEWs to do the same. The plots, though small, are the basic medium of experimentation, i.e. what happens when we do this one thing differently (apply ash, till differently, etc.). After some cajoling, I convinced them to put ideas on paper for next month, which we'll review. That's where I have to be really careful; if our FEWs feel as if they own their experiments, the process will work out much better for other farmers' eventual adoption. However, if it becomes our (i.e. the NGO's experiment), it will be the proverbial flash-in-the-pan.
Enough blathering for today. It was nice to see people enthused about trees on the farm, though.
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