August 5th, 2015 - The National Ag. Show

ZESCO continues to be an issue impacting work; we had a crap genset (what they call a generator here) that gave out Friday morning, so I went to the Showgrounds for the 2nd day of the National Agriculture Show, or as it's formally known, the Agriculture and Commercial Show of Zambia (ACSZ). 

The Show is a bit of a mystery to many people, mostly because of the spatial confusion that everyone is struck with inside the showgrounds ... this is due to it's organization and the overall lack of straight lines that permeates the Zambian id. 

The official map looks like this:

However, once you get inside, it feels a lot like this: 

I'm sort of bullet-headed when I go in there anymore for the following reasons:

• As the Show days go by, the people attending the stands care less and become nearly unresponsive ... it's a bit like the old Nintendo video games where the characters repeat the same thing over and over;
• At the same time, the number of attendees reaches an absolutely silly level;
• The lack of an index of who's where and showing what (see above, 2nd figure) makes visiting a specific area more of a voyage of discovery in a writhing sea of people;
• Most of the contacts you make never respond, making it a waste of business cards;
• I've been going to the show since 2007 and the amount of change (outside of more large-scale farm equipment) is negligible.

There's many other reasons I hustle in and out, but the biggest is that I know exactly what I want:

• SEEDS, man

Yes, seeds ... the small-scale farmers displays in Lima Hall and at the Women/Youth Stands are like crack for a small-scale agriculturalist; I go and eyeball the provincial stands for oddball seeds ... Tabora beans, sword beans, Congo beans, pinto groundnuts, tree seeds, etc. Usually, I reserve on Fridays and buy on Monday (after the displays are judged) ... ostensibly, the officers (usually provincial level MAL technocrats) sell on behalf of their farmers, but I am neither able nor willing to set up the accountability structures to ascertain that. I just want seeds of every shade to throw at the sands of Western Province to see what might work. 

How did I do this year? Not bad:

1. Sorghum x 4 varieties (15kgs total);
2. Sword beans Canavalia gladiata (5kg);
3. Red lima beans Phaseolus lunatus (5kg);
4. Groundnuts [peanuts] x 3 varieties (speckled, purple, Luena (Natal Common), and White Natal Common);
5. Lab-lab beans Lablab purpureus (5kg);
6. Pigeon peas Cajunus cajun (5kg)
7. New Rice For Africa (Nerica 4, Upland rice) 10 kg
8. Nerica 2, Upland rice 4 kg
9. Traditional maize (Pandawa, red tinted dent) 6kg
10. Angolan (brown) dent maize, 2 cobs
11. Guar Cyamopsis tetragonoloba (handful)

What do I do with these? Not much ... I have approximately 5 square meters in front of my house that can be cultivated (which I have harvested a nice little bit of cowpeas, traditional maize, and lima beans). Nope, they get packaged in quart-sized Ziplocs, labelled with a permanent marker, and shipped out to our lead farmers (60 total) ... it's amazing how they can sort out the planting and observations now, and give relatively good feedback on the performance. I also keep some handfuls for friends and to others who I collaborate on to propagate / multiply the seed ... if we find anything good, we can ramp it up in a hurry. 

It used to be sort of like throwing things out in the wind, but like I said ... now we've got a coterie of farmers who value experimentation and want to do more of it. 

The First Rain

It rained hard on Saturday night ... I can't say for how long, because I kept flitting in and out of sleep.
In my bouts of waking, I would listen to the pups mewl (they can't really bark or howl yet, thank God) in response to the lashing rain. That sounds really hard, leaving the four of them out in the elements, but I will be giving them away to people who have even less sympathies for canines. The dogs will, as they say here, get used.

The rain, though too early for planting, was opportunely timed for me. In July, I dug 20-some lines of planting basins in my largish backyard in an attempt to show empathy with the beneficiary farmers to whom I'm responsible. Unfortunately, as our soil has a sand (large grain) composition of 90-95%, meaning it's like digging hole in a beach ... they tend to not retain any shape for long due to wind, the looseness of the soil, the  packs of dogs that transit through my backyard, etc. So, all my holes had somehow slumped, and I haven't had time to put anything in them (in terms of organic inputs).

The hard rain was opportune because it hardened up the soil enough for me to dig out the basins early Sunday morning and backfill half of them with the charcoal (bio-char) I've been making in a piecemeal fashion since June. I say half, as I want to do some side-to-side comparisons of the growth of two or three purchased maize varieties:

• A hybrid [Pannar 53]
• An open-pollinated variety OPV [ZamSeed 521]\
• A mixed bag of traditional varieties [mbonyi a sizo])

I'm not sure if my charcoal will last, but I may extend the experiment to the other half of my plot, where I intend to grow four or five varieties of beans:

• Haricot beans
• Sugar beans (Pan 148)
• Pinto beans
• Velvet beans
• Jack beans

And groundnuts:

• Natal common (more common in Southern Zambia)
• Chishango (what we promote with our farmers)
• An unnamed white variety
• MGV4 (a red variety)

Though it's not a scientific experiment, it will be something to look at down the line.