The other blog ...

For those of you who don't know, I publish things for work that are much sunnier (mostly I'm quite dour and pessimistic about things; if you ever read Animal Farm in high school, I would be Benjamin).

http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/06/26/conservation-agriculture-fights-hunger-in-africa

It then got picked up by these guys:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/27/conservation-farming-africa_n_3510088.html?utm_hp_ref=impact

Unlike blogs like this, which people dig around for, you get some interesting comments in the public world; to which I quote from the aforementioned equine:

"Fools! Do you not see what is written on the side of that van?"

Osmotic Adoption

Relaxing in the Korea Gardens hotel in Lilongwe, Malawi ... traveled east for work and enjoying a restful Sunday of deleting emails, reviewing reports, and typing some advocacy documents.

I'm being a bit lazy today, but I wanted to post this paper (unpublished as far as I know) by a friend of mine in Malawi by the name of Stephen Carr; if you really dig into African agricultural literature, you might come across the title Surprised by Laughter, a quasi-autobiographical book he wrote about 10 years ago. You might also, if you Google the name, find that he was a relatively large voice in the quest to reinstate fertilizer subsidies in Malawi in 2006, largely due to his correct assertion that subsidizing inputs was far cheaper than sending food aid.

The paper is incredibly relevant to the work I do in that quality of delivery and appropriateness of interventions beats great inputs any time. Great read for those in ag. development.

Anyway, here goes:

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Author:           Stephen Carr

Date:               2004

Title:               OSMOSIS OR PROJECT ACTIVITY? THE SPREAD OF AGRO-FORESTRY IN MALAWI

ABSTRACT:

Unlike a number of new technologies and crops introduced into Africa in the past, the agro-forestry initiatives intended to improve soil quality are not spreading rapidly from farmer to farmer. This paper reviews the reasons for this failure in Malawi and describes current activities aimed at remedying this situation.

African small scale farmers have shown themselves eager to adopt innovation which they see as offering obvious benefits. In many parts of the continent farmers mainly plant crops which have been introduced from the Americas together with exotic trees from various parts of the world. They have also adopted new technologies such as ox-ploughing and the use of inorganic fertilizers. Most of this rapid spread of new crops and technology has been by a process of “osmosis” from farmer to farmer with little or no formal extension. Why then are agro-forestry technologies for improving soil quality not spreading in the same way? The reasons include faulty technology, a lack of appreciation of farmers’ labour constraints and the absence of a striking short term impact on productivity. The response to this situation has been the development of more appropriate technologies and the intensification of formal extension. As a result there has been increased uptake of the technology by farmers associated with projects but little osmotic spread. Fresh initiatives are now need which make greater use of the extensive informal networks which exit in the Malawian rural sector.

Key Words: crop productivity, extension, small-scale farmers, soil fertility, technology adoption

INTRODUCTION

The dramatic changes which took place in Sub-Saharan African small-scale farming during the first half of the twentieth century were largely due to the rapid spread of new ideas from farmer to farmer. These changes all provided obvious immediate benefits in terms of increased productivity per unit of labour or access to additional sources of food and cash. The challenge face a growing number of smallholders in Africa to-day is of a different nature. Counteracting the slow but steady loss of soil fertility on permanently cultivated land involves the use of quite unfamiliar concepts and offers benefits and returns which are less immediate and obvious than the switch from sorghum to maize or hoe to ox-plough. At the same time the people who shouldered the responsibility for developing appropriate technologies to meet the challenge of declining fertility of the often difficult soil conditions of Africa were moving into unfamiliar territory. In consequence, some of the early advice was faulty and this has also served to limit adoption by farmers. The technologies are now being further refined, but experience to date shows that intensive extension effort has been required in order to elicit farmer response. As a result the level of adoption remains far too low to have any impact at the national level. Malawi with its high population density and degrading soils offers a good example of the challenges posed by the factors described above.

EAGER ADOPTERS

Few countries in Africa were not touched by the spread of new crops from the Americas in the first half of the last century, but it is the rapidity of that spread which is particularly striking. Examples can be drawn from a wide range of ecological conditions which demonstrate this point. Cocoa was introduced from Central America to the Gold Coast (Ghana) at the end of the nineteenth century and spread rapidly from farmer to farmer so that production grew from 2,400 tons in 1902 to 176,000 in 1919 (Hill 1956). Cassava was not a major food crop in Nigeria in 1920 (Faulkner and Mackie 1933) but was the staple food of millions a couple of decades later. Sweet potatoes were so rare in Northern Uganda at the start of the last century that the vines could be used to replace cattle as a dowry (Driberg 1923) and yet by 1935 about 250,000 ha. Were recorded (Tothill 1940. Maize also spread rapidly across the East and South of the continent replacing sorghum and millet as the staple food of millions of families. There was not only a switch to more productive crops but quite new technologies, such as ox-ploughing, were also taken up with remarkable alacrity. An example of this can be drawn from Eastern Uganda where a handful of chiefs’ sons were trained in ox-ploughing in the early 1920’s. No further government help or encouragement was given and yet by 1936 it is recorded the 15,388 ox-ploughs were in use in Teso country alone (Tothill 1940).

All over the continent farmers demonstrated their eagerness to adopt new crops, new technologies, new foods and new trees and this adoption was almost entirely unrelated to any formal extension service but was the result of the flow of information from farmer to farmer by what can be described as osmosis. A much more recent example occurred in Malawi in the 1990’s when the government lifted its ban on smallholder production of burley tobacco. Within five years of the change in policy some 250,000 farmers were growing a crop which requires considerable skill in both production, curing, and marketing.

When African farmers have demonstrated so clearly their eagerness to adopt new crops and technologies together with the effectiveness of their own networks, why is it that there has been so little spread of agro-forestry innovations intended to deal with the problems of soil fertility with which many farmers are now 

faced?

FAULTY ADVISORS

One reason for the slow spread of the agro-forestry approach to raising soil quality was the weakness of some of the initial recommendation given to farmers in Malawi. The earliest work concentrated on alley cropping with Leucaena. The hedges grew strongly on the exceptionally fertile soils of Chitedze research station and gave encouraging results. After several years of research there was a major push to popularise this approach on farmers’ fields. It soon became obvious that the levels of growth at Chitedze were totally different to those obtained on the degraded soils available to farmers and after a few years the initiative was dropped. Unfortunately many farmers and had planted the hedgerows, seen no benefit from them and been made suspicious of agro-forestry. A range of different plants were then tried in alley cropping experiments both under the national research programme and by ICRAF. From these Senna spectablilis was selected as the plant of choice for the next major extension campaign. From the earliest stages of this work there were doubts in some quarters as to whether the plants were really drawing fresh nutrient supplies into the upper layers of the soil rather than simply recycling them. More importantly it soon became apparent that for poor families with no access to paid labour this was too risky an approach. Just a couple of weeks delay in pruning in the early part of the growing season could lead to a level of competition between the hedgerows and the young maize which seriously depressed crop yields. Attention then moved from alley cropping to inter-planting with Sesbania as the shrub of choice. ICRAF pioneered this work which consisted in raising thousands of seedling it polythene pots and transplanted them in a short “window” of time which clashed with the crucial first weeding of the maize. The whole process required unreasonable amount of expenditure and labour in relation of the benefits it produced and was impracticable for small scale farmers. Thus another three years was lost on a course which had been embarked upon with insufficient appreciation of the real conditions faced by farmers.

Throughout this time efforts were made to popularise the planting of Faidherbia albida in farmers’ fields as a long term contributor to soil fertility. Thousands of farmers were encouraged to establish nurseries in small polythene pots and the transplant the seedlings into their fields at the start of the rains. The results were disappointing. Most of the young trees put on virtually no growth in the first year and the tiny seedlings were walked on or hoed out because they were not noticed in a weedy crop. The occasional plant made excellent growth and survived leading to a situation where a farmer might have two or three Faidherbia plants actually growing in a field out of a hundred which had been planted. This was obviously not encouraging and the interest in Faidherbia faded.

These failures panned about fifteen years and have certainly contributed to the lack of widespread enthusiasm for the use of agro-forestry for raising soil fertility.

A FRESH START

These failures led to the development of new technical strategies of which the three most importer were:

1. A move from alley cropping to inter-planting to increase biomass and reduce the loss of area planted to the main crop;
2. The choice of Tephrosia vogelii for the inter-planting because it thrives under poor soil conditions in most of Malawi and can be planted directly in the maize crop rather than being raised in nurseries and transplanted;  
3. A change in the method of growing Faidherbia to overcome the problems of root damage caused by raising seedlings in small pots on the ground. This involved both direct seeding and the production of seedlings in much larger pots placed on racks to provide air pruning.

Once the technology had been improved the focus of attention moved to the challenge sharing it with farmers. The first major initiative came under a combined World Bank and IFAD project aimed at improving soil quality. This was a $17 million investment which used the 2,000 extension workers employed by the Ministry of Agriculture. At the end of five years very little had been achieved and the most optimistic estimate was that about 2,000 farmers had adopted some method of improving soil quality. This failure was blamed on the poor motivation and organization of the staff. Two bi-laterally funded projects subsequently took over the task. The Promotion of Soil Conservation and Rural Production (PROSCARP) project funded by the European Union works through the Ministry of Agriculture. The Malawi Agroforestry Extension Project (MAFE) works with the staff of 21 NGOS’s and 19 CBO’s. Both have outstanding senior staff who are not constrained by the limitations of a government department and are able to provide technical advice, training, leadership and encouragement to the front line extension staff of the government and the voluntary agencies. Both organisations encourage farmers to improve the quality of their soils through a range of activities including conservation, the use of manure and compost, crop diversification and agro-forestry. The main thrust of the last is inter-planting of Tephrosia and both have achieved remarkably similar results over the past four years as is shown by the following figures:

	Number of farm households involved	Number of ha. of Tephrosia planted
PROSCARP	66,780	5,134
MAFE	57,000	5,841

While these figures are a lot more encouraging than the results of the Ministry of Agriculture’s initiative funded by the World Bank they still represent a small fraction of the farming population and demonstrate that even the adopters are only using the technology on small part of their land. The limitations of this achievement is highlighted by the fact that some 35,000 additional families take up farming each year as a result of population growth so that the proportion using agro-forestry to improve soil fertility is actually declining.

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?

The “problem” needs to be seen form two perspectives. The first is that of the project managers who perceive it in terms of the quality and performance of extension staff. MAFE blames “low levels of expertise and motivation among extension staff, limited use of up-to-date extension materials, lack of co-ordination among service providers and inadequate monitoring and evaluation of what is working and why” (MAFE 2001). PROSCARP has similar perceptions. This focus on the problem as being institutional clearly demonstrates that the technology is not spreading from farmer to farmer by “osmosis” but is wholly dependent upon extension staff influencing individual farmers, which is inevitably a slow task which would take generations to have a nation impact even with an improvement in the quality of extension performance. The government has by far the largest cadre of field staff but even they have only one extension worker per 2,000 families while for the NGO’s the ration would be more than twice that number. Until the main route of adoption is from farmer to farmer there will only be a small proportion of the land under improved management using agroforestry.

The second aspect of the problem is, therefore, why are farmers not just copying from their neighbours as they have done with so many other innovations? It is certainly not a reluctance to plant trees. A recent survey revealed that 90% of farmers had planted trees at their homesteads and 86% had planted trees in their fields. (PROSCARP 2001). These were mostly for food, medicine, fuel or timber. This is further confirmed by MAFE’s recent experience with encouraging the planting of trees (as opposed to leguminous shrubs) where they have 210,000 participating families planting some 9 million trees per year (MAFE 2001). Why the reluctance to interplant Tephrosia? There are several fairly obvious reasons. The first is the shortage of examples of farmer success with the technology. Among the few thousand farmers who have attempted to use this technology only a small proportion have followed the critical rules for early planting, correct spacing and proper incorporation of the green manure during cultivation. Poorly developed stands of stunted Tephrosia plants do not provide an adequate boost to the following maize crop to convince farmers that the effort is worth the return. Really striking examples of enhanced fertility are few and far between, largely because of delaying planting of the Tephrosia. MAFE research indicates that where there has been a good stand of Tephrosia that in the first season it will raise the following maize crop yield by 20% (W. T. Bunderson, pers. comm. 2002). For an 800kg crop that is an additional 160kg. This is a useful addition but compares poorly with farmer experience of the impact of 100kg. of fertilizer which would more than double the yield. If the farmer persists then the second planting of Tephrosia will raise the yield by 40% which offers a more convincing example of the value of the technology. Poor experience in the first year means that examples of successful consecutive Tephrosia crops are even harder to identify. The second reason is that farmers are being asked to embark upon a quite new form of activity which does not relate to their previous experience. This is quite different to switching to an alternative food crop or planting a tree for timber or fuel. Instead of inter-planting pumpkins, beans or groundnuts the farmer is being asked to plant a crop which cannot be eaten, provides no human medicine and little fuel and yet must be treated with the same care and precise time as a food crop. Most smallholders in Malawi have little understanding of the role of rhizobia or the importance of organic matter in the soil so that it is not surprising that the technology is not spreading with the rapidity of an attractive new food crop or fuel wood tree. The switch from sorghum to maize required no totally new agricultural concept and therefore needed no education programme to foster adoption. The use of leguminous shrubs for green manuring does involve quite new concepts and therefore farmers need some basic education in soil fertility and not just a proposal to plant some strange seeds in between their maize plants.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

Based on the two classes of problem outlined above what can be done to help many more farmers to discover effective ways of stemming the current degradation of their land with a low cost innovation? This paper makes three suggestions.

The first is that the focus of the current extension efforts should be more on quality than on quantity. Until communities can see really successful examples of the use of a technology there is little likelihood of any farmer to farmer spread. Given the crucial importance of early planting, correct spacing and appropriate use of the resulting biomass it is essential that field staff are encouraged to have some well-distributed examples of the successful use of Tephrosia rather than large numbers of mediocre stands which have little impact on crop productivity. This will involve staff in hands on work with selected farmers to ensure that the job is done properly rather than giving instruction at a meeting. The same applies to the establishment of Faidherbia.

The second is that the extension effort will need to look more fundamentally at educating farmers in the basic concepts of soil fertility. Farmers whose ancestors have been able to rely on fallows to naturally restore fertility for them, have little traditional knowledge of what is happening to their farms now that they are under continuous cultivation. Without such an understanding it is unlikely that there will be any widespread adoption of technologies which seem quite alien to the farmers’ experience. For most extension staff this is something quite new. Farmers can be encouraged to switch to hybrid maize varieties without having to know the underlying principles hybridization, but dealing with the comparatively new problems of soil degradation does require a fresh understanding by farmers. Most extension staff in Malawi are not particularly good educators having been used to giving orders rather than embarking on a dialogue. There are ongoing efforts to change these deep seated attitudes but these efforts will also need to prepare staff to pass on more fundamental knowledge to farmers in an imaginative way.

Thirdly the widespread adoption of better soil management is going to depend on the better used of the thousands of informal groups which exist in the rural villages of Malawi. Throughout the Malawian countryside there are church women’s groups which meet regularly, mosque groups, choirs and traditional societies which are will defined and have widespread networks. These have the potential of providing thousands of volunteers to complement the work of formal extension officers. At present they have only been tapped by a small number of NGOs but they offer the one channel that could reach out to really large numbers of farmers. An extension worker who has worked with a few farmers to develop really successful examples of agro-forestry and then recruited a hundred volunteers who have had basic training in soil fertility and seen the successes, is likely to have a far wider impact than one who feels that he or she alone has the professional qualifications to carry out extension. Neither the government nor the NGO community can possibly employ enough staff to carry out this educational task without an army of volunteers. The groups are there in the rural areas. What is now needed is the courtesy, humility and understanding of the professional extension staff to elicit their support and through them initiate the osmotic spread of agro-forestry as a tool for counteracting the soil degradation which has become such an urgent problem for so many Malawian smallholders.

CONCLUSION

There is increasing evidence that currently available agro-forestry technology is capable of making a significant contribution to enhancing soil quality on the small scale farms of Malawi. It is currently being used by a small fraction of farmers and is spreading only though the direct action of formal sector extension workers despite abundant past evidence of farmers’ readiness to embrace new technologies. What is now needed are more obvious examples of the successful use of agro-forestry by farmers, more education of farmers in the basic principles of soil fertility and the use of the abundant network of village societies as a source of thousands of volunteers to supplement the work of formal sector extension staff. In this way the spread of the technology will change from being dependent on project activity to an osmotic movement from farmer to farmer.

REFERENCES

Driberg JH (1923) The Lango. Fisher and Unwin, London, UK

Faulkner OT and Mackie JR (1933) West African Agriculture. Cambridge University Press, UK

Hill P (1956) The Gold Cost Cocoa Farmer. Oxford University Press, UK

MAFE (2001) Annual report October 2000 to September 2001 Blantyre, Malawi

PROSCARP (2001) Information for management topic paper no. 25 Blantyre, Malawi

Tothill JD (1940) Agriculture in Uganda. Oxford University Press, UK