I'm at the new farm up north now and the heat is much more bearable as its 2,500 ft altitude here and it gets cool at night. There are a few bigger towns, but mostly its small villages of like 50 people living in a group surrounded by grasslands and some patches of trees. The villages tend to have fruit tress like avocado, mango, safu and others like the cola nut that give coca cola some of its flavor. Outside the villages there are small cleared patched with local crops grown - mostly manioc a very starchy root crop. Otherwise they grow sweet potatoes and some greens. The diet is pretty simple with a little variety thrown in like yesterday the workers were eating bushmeat (mostly antelope and wild pigs) and grasshoppers - a little too much roughage for me like eating thick grass. There are very few chickens and a fair amount of these short goats. I guess they don't eat the goats but sell them to muslims in the cities (lebanese run most of the retail stores here).
Now the farm. We are trying to work in 6 to 8 foot of native grassland that probably have been here forever. This area once had elephants roaming - they still do a little farther north. Its mixed species grass with bracken ferns, small bushes and some tall reeds. Probably should have shredded it first but we don't have on in any case so they slowly worked a diskplow though the field 5 ft at a time. This is like the pioneer work a century ago in the US.
Me at the edge of the field to give some perspective of the size of the native grass we're trying to clear with small equipment.
Diskplows that turned the grass down
The soil below is dark black loam with plenty of organic matter 18 to 24" deep and then a yellow subsoil. It should do great.
The grass left and the big root balls are still too much for the small disks we have, even when we put extra weight on them so we're having villagers gather up and burn the bigger ones. Then I plan on spreading dry fertilizer and disking again. Hopefully that will leave the ground clean enough to get a potato planter though it. Later on we can do more minimum till, but now we have to just work though all that grass. Does anybody have any better ideas?
Hand clearing and burning the grass clumps after the root balls
And it keeps raining and when it rains here it really rains. In the plateau region up north water is a problem There are very few rivers and no wells and yet it rains like crazy. I'd love to get a big drilling rig here and drill a deep well. There has to be water down there. The villages and people have these cisterns that collect the rain water off the roofs to survive.
There are also these big termite hills all over the place that will just stop a tractor. There must be two species, one that makes these big tall ones with the yellow subsoil and another that makes these short mushroom shaped ones with the black topsoil.They say you can tell how long its been since the field has been farmed by how tall the termite mounds are. Judging from that a long time. Here I am by one.
Anyway getting a house set up here for my home base up north where I'll spend a lot of time. Got solar panels and an inverter so we have power and plan on a elevated water tank with a solar pump to have running water instead getting bucket out of the cistern as now. The house will also serve as the office so the workers are in and out. The people are really friendly here and seam to have fun at most thing and my struggles with my french now. I get internet though the cell phone network and its not bad (3g). Here they never had landlines, just went right to cellphones.
We got some of the seed at the farm and are sorting it by hand and cutting some of the bigger one to store for three or so days and should be planting later this week. Have to keep going as more seed is arriving and we need to get in 70 HA (160 A) soon.
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