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A better way to make holes June 12th, 2022 by

Vea la versión en español a continuación

Eleven heads think better than one, as I saw recently in the northern Andes. While filming a video with Paul and Marcella, local people in Ancash, Peru were telling us that they plant pasture seed by “making a hole” and sprinkling in some grass seed and a bit of composted manure. It sounded pretty mundane until I saw someone do it.

Local livestock owners, Feliciano Cruz and Estela Balabarca, took us to see them plant grass in their pasture. Don Feliciano grabbed what looked like a pick, swung it into the ground and pulled up a perfect, fist-sized plug of sod. With a practiced hand, he moved quickly across the pasture, swinging his pick, with lumps of sod flying over his shoulder. In a second or two he could make a perfect, round hole about three inches deep (10 cm).

Doña Estela sprinkled some dry manure into the hole, and added a bit of rye grass seed she had harvested herself, and that was it. The seed wasn’t buried, but enough earth fell in from the sides of the hole to gently cover it.

When the seed sprouts at the bottom of its little hole, it is protected from the wind and animals, but will let in the rain water. Don Feliciano calls his invention the sacabocada (bite-taker), because it takes little bites out of the soil. He designed it to have a way to plant improved fodder grass without plowing the soil.

In a previous blog (The committee of the commons) I mentioned the CIAL, a committee for local, farmer experimenters. I asked don Feliciano how he invented the bite-taker. He said that in the CIAL, they realized that they need to avoid plowing, to conserve the soil. So, they designed a tool, based on the pick, but it made a big crack in the earth, and it did not release the clod. So the CIAL members kept talking about how to improve the bite-taker.

Don Feliciano said these discussions were “almost like a game,” until they came up with the idea of welding a short tube to a pick head. That design worked. The CIAL got the municipality to fund them to make 25 copies for 25 soles (about $6) each. Don Feliciano is not sure how many people use the bite-taker, but we did hear about the technique from at least one other community member.

The CIAL itself was an innovation, created by a team in Colombia, to bring together farmers and agronomists to dream up fresh ideas. The CIAL reached this corner of Peru through Vidal Rondán, an adult educator who read about the farmer committee, and contacted its creators for advice. He organized several of the CIALs. Nearly 25 years later, this community of farmers in the northern Peruvian Andes is still using the CIALs as a way to bring people together to stimulate creative thought.

In agricultural development, useful ideas, like CIALs, tend to blossom and then die, instead of evolving. This is partly because it is more rewarding to think of new tools and give them cool names than to tinker with an old concept. Like the bite-taker, the CIAL may have deserved a wider application than it got. But then, the bite-taker and the CIAL are both still available to be dusted off, or to provide inspiration for the next Big Idea.

Related Agro-Insight blogs

The committee of the commons

Moveable pasture

Further reading

Ashby, Jacqueline Anne 2000 Investing in farmers as researchers: Experience with local agricultural research committees in Latin America. Cali, Colombia: CIAT.

Video on another idea for research in rural communities

Succeed with seeds

Acknowledgements

The visit to Peru to film various farmer-to-farmer training videos with farmers like don Feliciano was made possible with the kind support of the Collaborative Crop Research Program (CCRP) of the McKnight Foundation. Thanks to Vidal Rondán of the Mountain Institute for introducing us to the community.

MEJORES AGUJEROS PARA SEMBRAR PASTO

Jeff Bentley, 12 de junio del 2023

Once cabezas piensan mejor que una, como confirmé hace poco en el norte de los Andes. Mientras grabábamos un video con Paul y Marcella, la gente de Ancash (Perú) nos contaba que ellos sembraban los pastos “haciendo un hueco” y echando algunas semillas de pasto y un poco de estiércol compostado. Sonaba bastante mundano hasta que vi a alguien hacerlo.

Los ganaderos locales, Feliciano Cruz y Estela Balabarca, nos llevaron a ver cómo sembraban el pasto. Don Feliciano agarró lo que parecía una picota, la clavó en la tierra y sacó un tapón de césped, del tamaño de un puño. Con una mano experta, se movió rápidamente sobre el pasto, moviendo la picota de arriba para abajo, con trozos de césped volando sobre su hombro. En un segundo o dos pudo hacer un agujero perfecto y redondo de unos 10 cm de profundidad.

Doña Estela esparció un poco de estiércol seco en el agujero y añadió un poco de semilla de ray gras que ella misma había cosechado, y eso fue todo. La semilla no se enterró, pero cayó suficiente tierra por los lados del agujero para cubrirla ligeramente.

Cuando la semilla brota en el fondo de su agujerito, queda protegida del viento y de los animales, pero deja entrar el agua de la lluvia. Don Feliciano llama a su invento la sacabocada, porque saca pequeñas bocadas de la tierra. Lo diseñó para poder sembrar pasto forrajero mejorado sin arar la tierra.

En un blog anterior (Comité campesino) mencioné el CIAL, un comité de experimentadores locales y campesinos. Le pregunté a don Feliciano cómo había inventado la sacabocada. Me dijo que en el CIAL se dieron cuenta de que necesitaban evitar arar el suelo, para conservarlo. Así que diseñaron una herramienta, basada en el pico, pero que hacía una gran grieta en la tierra, y no soltaba el terrón. Así que los miembros del CIAL siguieron hablando de cómo mejorar la sacabocada.

Don Feliciano dijo que estas discusiones eran “casi como un juego”, hasta que se les ocurrió soldar un tubo corto a la cabeza de la picota. Ese diseño funcionó. El CIAL consiguió que la municipalidad les financiara la fabricación de 25 ejemplares por 25 soles (unos 6 dólares) cada uno. Don Feliciano no está seguro de cuántas personas usan la sacabocada, pero nos enteramos de la técnica por al menos otro miembro de la comunidad.

El CIAL en sí mismo fue una innovación, creada por un equipo de Colombia, para reunir a agricultores y agrónomos con el fin de experimentar con nuevas ideas. El CIAL llegó a este rincón de Perú a través de Vidal Rondán, un educador de adultos que leyó sobre el comité de agricultores y se puso en contacto con sus creadores para pedirles consejo. Él organizó varios de los CIALes. Casi 25 años después, esta comunidad de agricultores del norte de los Andes peruanos sigue usando los CIALes como forma de reunir a la gente para estimular el pensamiento creativo.

En el desarrollo agrícola, las ideas útiles, como los CIAL, tienden a florecer y luego morir, en vez de evolucionarse. Esto se debe, en parte, a que es más gratificante pensar en nuevas herramientas y darles nombres atractivos que retocar un concepto antiguo. Al igual que la sacabocada, el CIAL podría haber merecido una aplicación más amplia de la que tuvo. Pero tanto la sacabocada como el CIAL siguen estando disponibles para ser desempolvados, o para servir de inspiración para la próxima Gran Idea.

Otros blogs de Agro-Insight

Comité campesino

Pasto movible

Lectura adicional

Ashby, Jacqueline A., Ann R. Braun, Teresa Gracia, M. D. P. Guerrero, Luis Alfredo Hernández Romero, Carlos Arturo Quirós Torres, y J. A. Roa. 2001.La comunidad se organiza para hacer investigación: experiencias de los comités de investigación agrícola local, CIAL en América Latina. CIAT: Cali, Colombia

Video sobre otra idea para investigación en comunidades

Succeed with seeds

Agradecimientos

Nuestra visita al Perú para filmar varios videos agricultor-a-agricultor con agricultoras como don Feliciano fue posible gracias al generoso apoyo del Programa Colaborativo de Investigación de Cultivos (CCRP) de la Fundación McKnight. Gracias a Vidal Rondán del Instituto Montaño por presentarnos a la comunidad.

 

 

 

Moveable pasture June 5th, 2022 by

Vea la versión en español a continuación

Ideas for agricultural development are a bit like fads. They come and then fade away, for no apparent reason. One such idea was the local agricultural research committee, or CIAL, which has been largely ignored in recent years. But where the CIAL has survived, it is still be quite functional. I mentioned in a previous blog (The committee of the commons) that the CIAL has led to lots of innovation in the community of Cordillera Blanca, in the Peruvian Andes, where this committee continues to function after more than 20 years.

Every functional innovation we saw in the community seemed to be related to the CIAL. For example, Paul and Marcella and I met community member Trinidad León (see Paul’s blog Farming as a lifestyle) while she was herding her sheep home through the bofedales, the high Andean wetlands.

We found a place to get out of the wind behind doña Trinidad’s stone cottage, where she explained that 30 years ago, overgrazing was a problem in the community. Back then, there was no grass like what we see now. This surprised me, because this rocky pasture at 4000 meters above sea level was thick with native needle grass when we saw it. Rotational grazing, moving the animals to let the pasture rest, had allowed this meadow to recover.

Rotational grazing is just one of the ideas that the CIAL and the community have experimented with over the years, working with different extensionists from The Mountain Institute, an NGO.

Doña Trinidad was not a member of the CIAL, but her husband was, and she knew well what the committee researched. Doña Trinidad explained how an agronomist named Doris Chávez worked with the community for several years, starting in about 2013, to discuss ways to improve pasture.

Previously, the couple would move their corral periodically, and allow it to seed itself in native pasture. Through their interaction with the CIAL, they saw the opportunity to use the corral as a place to grow fodder, not just to allow pasture to grow naturally. At planting time, they plow the soil and plant it with oats or barley, which they cut to feed to their animals. Later, the harvested barley patch grows into natural pasture, which the sheep graze. The following year, the land can be fenced within a corral again, to gather manure. So there is a three-year rotation: corral, oats and barley, pasture, before starting over again with the moveable corrals.

The CIAL is a committee of farmers, men and women, who test new ideas and share the results back with their community. The farmers themselves adapt the ideas, and from what we saw, they can be very successful. The oats and barley field is a healthy, emerald-green patch growing on the site of last year’s corral. Doña Trinidad takes a sickle and cuts an armful to feed to her cattle later that afternoon.

Agroecology, with its emphasis on co-construction of knowledge, is now gaining importance across the world. Researchers today might take inspiration from the CIAL, as a way to stimulate community research, especially for agroecology.

Further reading

Ashby, Jacqueline Anne 2000 Investing in farmers as researchers: Experience with local agricultural research committees in Latin America. Cali, Colombia: CIAT.

Acknowledgements

The visit to Peru to film various farmer-to-farmer training videos with farmers like doña Trinidad was made possible with the kind support of the Collaborative Crop Research Program (CCRP) of the McKnight Foundation. Thanks to Vidal Rondán of the Mountain Institute for introducing us to the community.

Video on another idea for research in rural communities

Succeed with seeds

Jeff Bentley, 5 de junio del 2022

PASTO MOVIBLE

Las ideas para el desarrollo agrícola son un poco como las modas. Vienen y luego se desaparecen, aparentemente sin razón. Una de esas ideas fue el Comité de Investigación Agrícola Local (CIAL), que ha sido ignorado en los últimos años. Pero donde el CIAL ha sobrevivido, sigue siendo bastante funcional. En un blog anterior (Comité campesino) mencioné que el CIAL ha dado lugar a muchas innovaciones en la comunidad de Cordillera Blanca, en los Andes peruanos, donde este comité sigue funcionando después de más de 20 años.

Todas las innovaciones funcionales que vimos en la comunidad parecían estar relacionadas con el CIAL. Por ejemplo, Paul, Marcella y yo conocimos a Trinidad León, miembro de la comunidad (véase el blog de Paul Farming as a lifestyle), mientras arreaba sus ovejas a casa a través de los bofedales, los humedales altoandinos.

Encontramos un lugar para salir del viento detrás de la cabaña de piedra de doña Trinidad, donde nos explicó que hace 30 años el sobrepastoreo era un problema en la comunidad. En aquel entonces, no había pasto como el que vemos ahora. Esto me sorprendió, porque este pasto rocoso a 4.000 metros sobre el nivel del mar estaba lleno de ichu nativo cuando lo vimos. El pastoreo rotativo, que consiste en mover a los animales para dejar descansar el pasto, había permitido que esta pradera se recuperara.

El pastoreo rotativo es sólo una de las ideas que el CIAL y la comunidad han experimentado a lo largo de los años, trabajando con diferentes extensionistas del Instituto de Montaño, una ONG.

Doña Trinidad no era miembro del CIAL, pero su marido sí era, y ella conocía bien lo que investigaba el comité. Doña Trinidad explicó cómo una agrónoma llamada Doris Chávez trabajó con la comunidad durante varios años, a partir de 2013, para discutir formas de mejorar los pastos.

Anteriormente, la pareja movía su corral periódicamente, y permitía que se auto-sembrara en pasto nativo. A través de su interacción con el CIAL, vieron la oportunidad de usar el corral como un lugar para cultivar forraje, no sólo para permitir que los pastos crezcan de forma natural. En la época de siembra, aran la tierra y la siembran con avena o cebada, que cortan para alimentar a sus animales. Más tarde, la parcela de cebada cosechada se convierte en un pasto natural que las ovejas pastan. Al año siguiente, la tierra puede volver a cercarse dentro de un corral, para recoger el estiércol. Así pues, hay una rotación de tres años: corral, avena y cebada, pastos, antes de volver a empezar con los corrales móviles.

El CIAL es un comité de agricultores, hombres y mujeres, que prueban nuevas ideas y comparten los resultados con su comunidad. Los propios agricultores adaptan las ideas y, por lo que vimos, pueden tener mucho éxito. El campo de avena y cebada es una parcela sana, una mancha verde esmeralda que crece en el lugar del corral del año pasado. Doña Trinidad toma una hoz y corta un bulto para alimentar a su ganado esa misma tarde.

La agroecología, con su énfasis en la construcción conjunta del conocimiento, está ganando importancia en todo el mundo. Los investigadores de hoy podrían inspirarse en el CIAL, como forma de estimular la investigación comunitaria, especialmente para la agroecología.

Lectura adicional

Ashby, Jacqueline Anne 2000 Investing in farmers as researchers: Experience with local agricultural research committees in Latin America. Cali, Colombia: CIAT.

Agradecimientos

Nuestra visita al Perú para filmar varios videos agricultor-a-agricultor con agricultoras como doña Trinidad fue posible gracias al generoso apoyo del Programa Colaborativo de Investigación de Cultivos (CCRP) de la Fundación McKnight. Gracias a Vidal Rondán del Instituto Montaño por presentarnos a la comunidad.

Video sobre otra idea para la investigación con las comunidades rurales

Succeed with seeds

Sowing experiments April 24th, 2022 by

For nearly a century, from 1839 to 1924, the US government distributed free seeds to any citizen who wanted them. As told in First the Seed, by Jack Kloppenburg, seeds of field crops, vegetables and even flowers were sourced from around the world (often by the US Navy). The seed was multiplied in the USA, and mailed through the post by members of Congress to their constituents. The program was wildly popular and by 1861, the first year of the American Civil War, almost two and a half million seed packages (each with five packets of seed) were being shipped each year to farmers and gardeners.

As Kloppenburg explains, given the botanical knowledge of the time, and the limited ability of formal agricultural research in the United States, the free seed for farmers “was the most efficient means of developing adapted and improved crop varieties.”

I recently saw a little window into this seed program. On 7 April 2022, The Times-Independent (a newspaper in Moab, Utah), published a replica of their page one from exactly 100 years earlier. One short story, “Seeds Go Quickly” showed just how much people loved free seed. The little story reads:


SEEDS GO QUICKLY

In last Thursday’s issue, The Times-Independent announced that a quantity of government seeds had been received by this office for distribution to the people of Moab, and inviting those who wanted some of the seeds to call for them. Within a few minutes after the paper was delivered to the post office, local people commenced to call for the seeds, and there was a continuous demand until the supply was entirely exhausted.


I hadn’t realized that newspapers also helped to distribute the seed. In 1922, Moab’s local newspaper did not bother telling its readers what the “government seed” was. They knew it well, even though today the program is forgotten. Kloppenburg says that the government seed was not only free, but of high quality, better than what private companies were then able to supply. This partly explains the rush of townspeople clamoring seed at The Times-Independent office, but farmers’ love of innovation was also a reason for the excitement. The farmers and gardeners who swung open the glass door of the newspaper office didn’t know what kind of seed was in the little packages. There was some mystery there: each package contained several packets of different seed. Each packet was just a handful of seed, enough to try out, but not enough to plant a field.

The free seed sparked thousands of farmer experiments over decades, which formed the basis of modern, North American agriculture.

The development of the adapted base of germplasm on which American agriculture was raised is the product of thousands of experiments by thousands of farmers committing millions of hours of labor in thousands of diverse ecological niches over a period of many decades.

Jack Kloppenburg, First the Seed, page 56

In the early 1800s seed companies were small, but they were growing. By 1883 these companies organized as the American Seed Trade Association (ASTA) and immediately began to lobby against government seed. Free seed was so popular that it took ASTA forty years, until 1924, to finally convince Congress to kill the program, at the height of its popularity.

Since 1922, companies have largely wrested control of seed from farmers, who once produced and exchanged all of the seed of field crops. It’s worth remembering that small gifts of seed sparked farmer experiments that shaped American agriculture.

Further reading

Kloppenburg, Jack Ralph, Jr. 1990 First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, 1492-2000. Cambridge University Press.

Related Agro-Insight blogs

The times they are a changing

Remembering an American king

Dick’s Ice box

Videos on using your own seed

Farmers’ rights to seed: experiences from Guatemala

Farmers’ rights to seed – Malawi

Succeed with seeds

Maintaining varietal purity of sesame

Harvesting and storing soya bean seed

Storing cowpea seed

Well dried seed is good seed

Rice seed preservation

Soil for a living planet January 30th, 2022 by

In a refreshingly optimistic book, The Soil Will Save Us, Kristin Ohlson explains how agriculture could stop emitting carbon, and instead remove it from the air and place it in the soil.

Soil life is complex. A teaspoon of soil may harbor between one and seven billion living things. Microorganisms like fungi and bacteria give mineral nutrients to plants in exchange for carbon-rich sugars. Predatory protozoa and nematodes (worms) then eat the fungi and bacteria, releasing the nutrients from their bodies back to the soil.

When people add chemical fertilizer to the soil, these living things die, essentially starved to death as the plants no longer need to interact with them. The plants become dependent on chemical fertilizer. Reading this in Ohlson’s book reminded me of farmers in Honduras and around the world, who have been telling me for over 30 years that soil quickly “becomes used to,” or “accustomed” to chemical fertilizers. Local knowledge is often ahead of the science.

When soil is plowed, it loses some of its carbon. The plow lets in air that binds with the carbon to become C02, which rises into the atmosphere. Plowed soil is broken, and more prone to erosion than natural, plant-covered earth. One of the many people Ohlson interviewed for her book, innovative North Dakota farmer Gabe Brown, grows a biodiverse mix of cover crops, including grasses and legumes. But instead of harvesting these crops, Brown lets his cows graze on them. Then he drills corn (maize) or other cash crops into the soil, instead of plowing it. No chemical fertilizers are applied. This soil is productive, while saving labor and expense, and absorbing carbon instead of giving it off. This healthy soil holds more water than plowed soil, so the crops resist droughts. Brown developed this system working with Innovative scientists like Jay Furhrer and Kristine Nichols of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), an example of the power of collaborative research.

Brown is not the only farmer trying to conserve the soil, but when Ohlson was writing about a decade ago, only 4.3% of US farmland was enrolled in any kind of government land conservation program.

Encouraging more farmers to conserve the soil will require public universities to do more research on no-till farming i.e., forsaking the plow and encouraging cover crops and livestock grazing to boost soil fertility. Universities have to stop accepting grants from companies that produce the chemical fertilizer, the pesticides and the genetically modified crop seeds that tolerate them. Accepting corporate money diverts university research into chemical farming, even though taxpayers still pay the faculty members’ salaries and society pays the price for soils becoming unproductive in the long-term.

Fortunately, there is much that we can all do at home, in gardens, parks and even lawns. The biggest irrigated crop in the United States is not maize, but lawns, which take up three times as much space as corn. Lawns can be managed without chemicals: fertilized with compost, while clover and other legumes can be planted among the grass to improve the soil. Families can make compost at home and fertilize the garden with it. City parks can also sequester carbon. The Battery Park in Manhattan is fertilized entirely with compost and compost tea (a liquid compost).

I was encouraged by this book. Agriculture could be the solution to climate change, and even help to cool the planet, rather than being a major contributor to the problem.

Get involved

In 2015, just after Ohlson’s book was published, some 60 people from 21 countries met in Costa Rica and formed Regenerative Agriculture, an international movement united around a common goal: to reverse global warming and end world hunger by facilitating and accelerating the global transition to regenerative agriculture and land management. Click here to find a partner organization in your area.

Further reading

Ohlson, Kristin 2014 The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers and Foodies Are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet. New York: Rodale. 242 pp.

Related Agro-Insight blogs

Hügelkultur

Capturing carbon in our soils

Community and microbes

Living Soil: A film review

A revolution for our soil

Out of space

Videos on how to improve the soil

See some of the many videos on soil management hosted by Access Agriculture.

 

Innovating with roots, tubers and bananas January 16th, 2022 by

A new book edited by Graham Thiele and colleagues of the CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas (RTB) highlights research over the past decade on a remarkable group of crops that are grown from vegetative seed (such as cuttings and roots). Crops include potato, sweetpotato, cassava, yam and bananas, all of which were domesticated in the tropics and are a big part of the daily diet in many developing countries. Continued research on these crops is important to keep family farmers competitive, and to keep producing food locally in tropical countries.

One chapter of the book describes how cassava is becoming an ever more important crop in West Africa, both for food and for manufacturing (flour, starch and alcohol), yet this has led to a new problem. Cottage processors and food manufacturers are creating mounds of peels, rotting in the open air. Nigerian researcher Iheanacho Okike and colleagues describe their innovation to turn garbage to gold by converting peels into livestock feed. Various feed makers are now making cassava peels into meal, as a substitute for imported maize.

The potato currently enjoys high demand across Africa, where it can be grown at higher altitudes. But a bottleneck has been getting access to disease-free seed, especially of new varieties that farmers want. A chapter by Elmar Schulte-Geldermann and colleagues discuss techniques that can be used by national agricultural programs or local companies to produce lots of seed quickly, using aeroponics and rooted apical cuttings (two methods for growing potato plants from cuttings in nurseries). This seed is distributed to seed producers, who rear and sell seed for farmers.

Margaret McEwan and colleagues describe Triple S (storage in sand and sprouting), a way for smallholders to conserve sweetpotato seed roots during the dry season in nothing more complicated than sand pits lined with mud bricks.

Agricultural researchers have been urged for years to work more closely with farmers, but often with limited guidance about how to do so. This book fills some of that gap. Vivian Polar and other gender experts have a chapter on methods that plant breeders can use to ensure that new crop varieties meet the needs of women and men.

Jorge Andrade-Piedra and colleagues discuss methods for studying seed systems, usually managed entirely by farmers, with little outside influence. These practical study methods would be beneficial to any development organization or project interested in understanding local seed systems before engaging with them.

These and other chapters feature the agronomy and social innovations of yams, sweetpotatoes, cassava, potatoes and bananas. Few books compile the results of agricultural research over ten years, by such a large group of scientists. The results show the value of publicly-funded research to benefit smallholder farmers in the tropics.

Further reading  

Thiele, Graham, Michael Friedmann, Hugo Campos, Vivian Polar and Jeffery W Bentley (Eds.) 2022. Root, Tuber and Banana Food System Innovations Root, Tuber and Banana Food System Innovations: Value Creation for Inclusive Outcomes. Springer, Cham.

The book will be out soon, and can be pre-ordered online from various book-dealers.

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