Its now the dry season and things are drying up and water up here in the plateaux region is getting to be a problem. People with cisterns still have rain water collected earlier. Cisterns vary from these cement/clay large pots, to steel barrels to underground ones from cement to holes in the ground lined with plastic. Once that water is gone, you have to walk 20 km to the river or buy water from the water trucks that make that trip. ( my cistern is half gone and its conservation mode here) Water is 200 to 500 cFA for 25 liters ($0.40-$1 per 7 gals. This is probably the big reason there are a lot less people living here in the highlands than down south where there are more rivers. I hear some wells have been drilled without success, but there are a few springs in low spots so its probably very important where you drill.
The fields are burning here. There are grass fires every day everywhere. They mostly don’t burn the trees down. People start fires to get ready for where they will be farming next year or start a fire and wait on the other side to kill any animals that come out and the fires get out of control and just keep burring. There is a lot of open grasslands here so there is plenty of land to burn. On the new farm we started one to burn off most of the tall grass to make it easier to work the ground, and that fire went far. There is smoke everywhere and at times ashes falling. No one seams concerned about it, even when its close to town or their villages.
The minister of Agriculture came up and inaugurated the new farm in Nkoumou, Ngo. It was mostly a ceremony in the village and we had some new tractors lined up as the farm is just open fields now. There was dancing, singing and drumming by the villagers and a lot of speeches. The community comes out for everything new we do and it’s a big deal. This is something I really like starting out from scratch, we drop out of the sky more or less in a small isolate village and change their lives forever. The young guys especially really want to learn and do new things. From my past development work I’ve learned its not always the things you build, but the people that you change that has the long lasting effect on a community and it multiplies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvLyGyHpt2Y
Potato harvest just started. Just getting people trained up now. W e have two 2 row potato diggers that struggle though the areas with those tall weeds. I’m not used to elephant grass or tall bracken ferns in a potato field. Then we have a bunch of people to separate the smaller seed tubers from the bigger ones to send to market and bag them up. The yield is OK, the Reds the best but probably because they were faster and took advantage of the rains earlier. We really needed to more weeks of rain and better weed control. For next season I’m ordering herbicides that will actually kill the weeds they have here, Also the tractor drivers are better now and should be able to drive straighter so we can cultivate the potatoes two time that are needed (this season I gave up on the second cultivation as they were taking out more potatoes than I thought the weeds would damage the crop), and plant earlier. The size and quality looks pretty good. There is some wireworm damage and some isolated spots of bacterial wilt. There was a huge difference in yield were the bracken fern was growing. Bracken fern has a known allelopathic plant that suppresses other plants and I guess potatoes so we’ll know better to avoid those spots next season. Another interesting thing is thaat that tall grass where it regrew grew right though the potato tubers. The minister of Ag also came to kick off the potato harvest with all the fanfare. We will deliver 1 ton of potatoes to the President during the independence day festival in nearby Jdambala on Aug 15th.
The potato seed cellar is almost done. It’s a mud brick structure like those old ones used in the US many years ago. It has a dirt floor so we could dump some water on the floor to get humidity and I have two vents that I want to install a solar fan to bring in cool night air. This way we can multiply some seed for next year and just bring in new imported seed to refresh the stock. Also when the imported seed arrived in Feb we had no place to store it while planting and a lot broke down in that 90 degree heat.
The dry bean harvest started as well. Since we don’t have a combine here yet this season we have to do it by hand. The people pull the bean plants up by hand in the morning while they are still supple and haul them to the farm headquarters in a trailer and place them on a tarp. When the sun gets out and drys them they beat them with a stick to release the beans form the pods and throw off the trash. The beans are then winnowed by pouring them from a buck to a wheelbarrel with the help of some wind to clean out the fines. The white beans are doing poorly since they got hit by angular spot disease, but the reds and pintos looks good as they has resistance to this disease.
Got delivery of these big Russian tractors and Brazilian disks (4 MT weight with 1 m disks) to work up the ground for next season in mid September. They are lumbering things but they get though that tall grass and every munch up the small tress. They struggle though the old hills made by the women in there garden plots of the past. They can work up 2 - 3 HA per hour and we have already worked a big amount on the new farm. That doesn’t sound like much by US standards, but it’s a lot compared to what we were trying with that small equipment to get the ground ready for the potatoes and beans in Feb/March. We were lucky to get 3 HA per day. The second rainy season starts in late Sept and I hear is more rain and longer. Another try for potatoes, dry beans, onions, carrots, lentils and peanuts down south - and some corn and soybeans.
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