After an interview with farmers it’s important to get off one’s butt and go see what they’ve been talking about. There is always something to see, even if the crop has been harvested.

I was in Tampetou, Northern Benin last year with Florent Okry. When we got there, the chief (chef du village) was away at a cotton buying session, a mile or two away. His family rang him on his cell phone and he rode his bike home to meet with us.

Other people soon arrived and quietly took seats under the shade tree in the chief’s compound.

We were there to ask them about some videos they had seen five years earlier, about healthy rice seed and processing rice. We wanted to know if just watching some videos would lead people to experiment with any of the new ideas.

The people said that before the video, they didn’t give much importance to rice. They only grew a bit in the bas-fond, i.e. a humid low spot in the rolling West African plains.

After watching the video, many more people started growing rice. They said that there were 20 people growing rice before, now there are 45. That was quite a lot of people, more than in most villages. But every place is different. In Tampetou it was possible to grow so much more rice because they have plenty of low, humid land, and most of it was going unplanted.

The chef du village was willing to take us to see a rice field, but his back was hurting him, so he said he would ride his bicycle. He went to get his old, yellow bicycle. It was the same bike he rode up on when we first saw him, a girl’s bike. But as he took hold of it, he realized that the chain was now broken. (It was pretty rusty, and perhaps one of the various visitors had accidentally stepped on it).

The chief paused and said that if he pushed his bike, it would support his back so that it would not hurt. So off we went, the chief pushing his bike with us following, down the hard beaten path in the red dirt. After a bit the path sloped downhill ever so slightly and the chief got on his bike and slowly coasted. When the land started to rise again the bike came to a standstill. Florent trotted up to the bike and pushed it up the rise, for quite a way, joking all the time, encouraging the chief and convincing him that there was nothing he wanted to do more than push a bike uphill in the full glare of the blistering, mid-day sun.

In the lowlands we saw that there was indeed a lot of land here. The chief had tried a bit of rice in the corner of his millet field and further down in the lowlands he had planted some rice in between the rows of yam mounds, which is a traditional practice. But most of the lowland was in thick grass, and a youth was herding a large herd of long-horned cattle in it. We could see that this village had lots of land, perfect for rice, and some folks were trying their hand at it.

Further reading:

Bentley, Jeffery, Paul Van Mele, Florent Okry & Espérance Zossou 2014 Videos that speak for themselves: When non-extensionists show agricultural videos to large audiences. Development in Practice 24(7):921-929. Download the full paper.

Free videos:

You can watch the videos that the villagers saw on rice seed ; on rice quality ; and on parboiling