Congo Update 20 May 2013

Greetings from the Congo

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. 

Village of Nkounou near the new Ngo farm

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.

Packed truck

Live goats lashed on the side of the truck for delivery to town.  The goats seam to be watching the scenery going by, the pigs on the other hand didn’t look too happy. 

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. 

Congo Update 12 May 2013

Greeting from the Congo

Started on the second cultivation on the early planted potatoes.  I didn’t really want to cultivate a second time as cultivating when the plants are this big cuts some of the potato roots as well as getting the weeds, but the sedge in places would cause more damage in the long run than some pruned potato roots.  Its always a balance.  It took us a month to plant the potatoes so they are pretty spread out in maturity from just re-emerging after hilling to a foot tall with small new potatoes.  This is good to spread out the harvest.  Other people keep telling me not to worry about harvest getting them dug, put in sacks, loaded on trucks and moved over bad roads and sold, but I know how much tonnage is possible if the potatoes do as well as they could.  Potatoes produce more tonnage of harvest than any other crop.  Its going to be fun.

And finally the pneumatic planter arrived minus some parts so we had to go to the back of the manual in the section called “wing it” and use the fertilizer tank axels to run the planters thus only four planter boxes with pieces of wood stuck in the other suction lines.  Got some innoculum air shipped from the US to innoculate the seed.  Hopefully it works as I can find no Rhizobium bacteria nodules on the local bean roots. 

Assembling the planter

Innoculated the bean seed

Since things have slowed down, went down south to visit the southern farm.  Things are dry down there - about half the rain and not any for awhile.  The potatoes down there aren’t looking that great except in a low area where the water collects and they are wetter.  They are starting to flower and haven’t started putting out stolons where the new potatoes will form.  That is not good. 

The corn and soybeans look good even though they are also drought affected and short, but the soybeans have around 50 pods per plant and some of the corn has two ears per plant.  The first rainy season corn they are harvesting now.  Its definitely a slow process by US standards, but faster than harvesting it all by hand.  They have a combine that loads up these small trailers that get pulled into the farm center to be bagged up by a quite nice bag loader.  The nearby goats have learned there is good food to be had and stand by ready for any fallen grain.

The corn is going mostly as chicken feed now but the plan is to produce a porridge with milled corn, soybeans and some sugar so the kids will like it to supply the school lunch program.  That will mean getting a soybean roaster that runs of multiple fuels and a de-huller and a hammer mill.  This is how IPHD started here in the Congo - feeding school kids. The program ran on imported food and as the program funding started to get transferred from USDA money to the Government of Congo money (read oil money) the idea came up to grow some of the food here and the farms were started.  In the new proposed farm bill there is language to change the food aid to buy some of the food locally and some farm groups are fighting it.  I know they want to defend a market, but they need to think about their fellow farmers in less developed lands.  Food given away is hard on local farmers as its hard to compete against free.  The years when food is scarce is when farmers really can make money and upgrade their farms, but feed food erases that situation and farming never advances keeping a developing country possible forever food short.  Buying up the local food at a good price and then maybe shipping in food can stop a famine and help local farmers. 

Anyway, getting a little political so I’ll close with a picture of a girl in her Sunday best clothes.