Experimental Farm Visit

A tour of differently spaced bean fields w/ natural pesticides

A few weeks ago now we had a very interesting visit to a farm just outside our city where they test out different crops and techniques to demonstrate for local people what will help them get higher yields. There was an open-house for community members to come in and see the fields and techniques, and we were invited by some missionary friends who work at the farm to come as well, so we had the chance to learn a lot more about the problems in agriculture from some specialists.

An interesting tid-bit we picked up is that looking at the hard data for our city, rainfall hasn't been decreasing too much over the last 100 years. The bigger problem is decreasing yield because the soil is being stripped of nutrients, which is partly because of over-farming due to the rapid population increase. Farmers used to be able to switch fields every few years because there was more open land all around them, but now there is not enough land for all the people who want to farm. So the most important techniques this farm is trying to encourage are simple things like crop rotation, use of manure (which is actually hard to collect here), and natural pesticides. From our conversation, the biggest need they have at this farm seems to be creative ways to collect manure or turn chicken waste into more usable stuff.

A Delight with lush bean fields and lots of tall gao trees

A second encouraging tid-bit was that there has actually been a significant increase in the amount of trees and greenspace over the last decade in about a 500 hectare area of our country. This is surprising because we’ve heard a lot about the desert expanding through animals and humans destroying so many trees/foliage. But apparently there has been progress in the right direction because of the efforts to regrow trees from the old surviving root systems that are still present in fields. Some agricultural specialists discovered that there are actually a fair number of trees around from a hardy species that maintains its roots and tries to grow back multiple seasons after being cut down. What they had to do was convince the average farmers not to keep cutting this new growth down and instead to keep animals away from it so that the trees would come back. Then they would see the benefits for their crops of having trees in their fields, through the decrease of wind and more natural compost material. We hope to come back again and keep getting more of this encouraging experience to share with the local farmers we know!