Rain is a bird

I have been tramping around Mongu district in our Conservation Agriculture (CA) project areas for the past three days, and the consistent thing I can say is that nothing was consistent. Field sizes, plot locations, plant population, row spacing, farmer knowledge, planting dates, etc., etc., vary all over the map; the only commonality was that almost no one knew what the names of the seeds were that they planted.

Oh, and one slight detail ... it hasn't rained much since November 15th, the unofficial start of our planting season.

When I was passing for a soil science student while doing my master's degree in agroecology, we learned about Liebig's Law of the Minimum ... the idea that a plant's growth is limited by the most limited nutrient. For example, if you have plenty of phosphorus (Ph) and nitrogen (N), but lack potassium (K), a given plant will only grow / yield according to the limiting K, effectively canceling the surplus Ph and N.

Pictorially, it is represented as a old-style barrel with staves of different lengths:


Wikipedia (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1c/Minimum-Tonne.svg/220px-Minimum-Tonne.svg.png)

The amount of water (you're eventual yield) that you can hold in Liebig's barrel is limited by the shortest stave. Pretty simple, and unfortunately, one of those immutable laws like gravity, death, Murphy's, etc.

We were evaluating fields in Namushakende, and I couldn't get that damn barrel out of my head. We encourage farmers to plant with the first rains after November 15th (which fell variably across the Namushakende area on either the 25th or 28th). They did so, and then it hasn't really rained much since. A double kicker with the lovely sunny days is that the soil surface in the fields in the sandy uplands gets hot enough to fry eggs ... whatever germinates sits in a 10 cm zone of absolute broiling heat. So the maize that has come up is looking like so many rows of onions.

Water is the most limiting of limiting factors.

__What do we do? I would shrug and point up at the sky, though I sincerely doubt lack of churches is driving this particular dry spell.

Our extension worker in Namushakende is a older gentlemen with elven features and a subtle sense of humor, and he told me as we were wrapping up our monitoring that there was a saying in siLozi to the effect that "rain is a bird". I asked what he meant; moving his hands rapidly side-to-side, he explained that the rain shifts around a lot like a bird.

Is it common to beseech the Almighty in a blog? I'm not sure, but God, please send rain.