Went new farm hunting this week. There is a big farm planned around the town of Ngo and I want to get started on it. Have to get started working ground soon as we are going into winter and the dry season and the ground will get too dry to work maybe in July and August. Congo is mostly just a bit south of the Equator and it matters as the seasons are reversed. Being this close though means the sun rises and sets really fast . I want to go to the Equator on day which is only about 4 hours north where water drains straight down, you have less strength and you can balance and egg on its head I hear. We met with the Ministry of Agriculture in the capital, Brazzaville and he put us in contact with people that had some land. Even though there are vast swaths of land unoccupied some are owned by connected people, others are claimed by villages as ancestral rights and the rest is owned by the government. Then we were taken up to the proposed land and meet the village leaders nearby. At first they were thinking to plant manioc and I was like no. I’m thinking 250 HA of corn mainly because there is a lot of land preparation to do and corn is easy. After some talking they asked about tomatoes and potatoes and I was like yes now you’re thinking out of the box. The other part of the program is training locals in mechanized Ag and I want to hire all out of this tiny village this time instead of bringing in outsiders you need to find housing. This farm will be on open land, no structures, water or electricity. The other farms in this program took over old government farms.
The land is great. Flat grasslands. I did some soil sampling and went down 3 foot and didn’t hit that yellow clay layer found most elsewhere here in the Congo. The topsoil smells and has the texture of peat moss. Very few trees and none of those big termite hills as there isn’t the kind of soil they like - clay. The villagers tell me there is a natural spring about 4 km away. Should be water underground - one day I’d love to drill for it if we can find a drill rig. A flat highlands with so much rain and no rivers in the valleys, the water has to be somewhere underground.
On the way back there was a procession of loaded trucks from towns up north. There isn’t much transport availability here so when there is the trucks are really loaded. Carrying crops, live animals and people. The are live goats and pigs fastened in ropes and vines for the journey to the bigger cities for sale. Everyone seams to being raising goats and some pigs, but when asked if they eat them, its usually no these are for sale. There meat source is mostly bushmeat - what they can shoot locally.
As the restaurant menu in Djambala in this next picture advertises the menu of the day of: Fresh monkey, wild pig, antelope and harvested local greens.
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