Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Congo Update 27 Jan 2014

Greeting from the Congo

The first season crops are growing well mostly.  At the Nkoumou, Ngo farm which is on virgin ground everything look great with healthy crops and few weeds.  At Lekana it is a mixed picture with weeds in some places and beetles attacking the beans.  The sedge herbicides I tried (Sandea (Halosulfuron) and Dual (Metalachlor) both did an excellent job controlling the yellow nutsedge which was the worst weed issue but did little for the other weeds.  I didn’t expect much effect on what I call the forest weeds - bracken ferns, large weeds from underground bulbs and native bunch grasses.  Guess we will have to mix cultivation for these large weeds with herbicide for the sedges that you can not effectively cultivate.  The guys are driving straighter so they can actually cultivate now.  The new crops to the area like potatoes and corn have few if any pests.  There are a lot of native wild beans and peanuts grown in the area so the dry beans we plant have more trouble with insect pests.  Diseases I am looking for resistant varieties which we have already found some good ones.



We did try growing some angolan Beans as a green manure crop and to see if they could deal with the bracken fern problem and they actually did really well dominating the bracken fern.

Moving the combine up for the two north farms was a big job and it got damaged on the trip north.  Logistics and moving things is a big issue here.  There are few trucking companies and they charge a lot.  We had to adapt a trailer for the combine, but they attached it wrong and broke things.  We sometimes drive things up north by another route that bypasses the capital Brazzaville as taking large Ag equipment though the busy crowded chaotic streets of the capital would be a challenge.  Driving here you have to be aggressive if you want to get anywhere.  The issue is part of the back way involves a patch where there really isn’t a road.  People just drive across the open rolling plains and the soils are sandy so you can get stuck.  This is Ok for a tractor, but we worried about a combine.

The soils here seam to be three types.  In the south it is red loamy clays that are very acid and weathered.  Up north it is mostly these white sands.  On the Plateaux there is this rich black 6 % organic matter layer on top of a yellow clay that can support those 8 ft grasses and patches of thick forest, but as soon as you go off the flat top of the plateaux it is miles and miles of these rolling hills of sand where the grass and trees are shorter as the low water holding capacity of the sands limits growth.  I have not visited the swampy jungle areas of the North part of Congo yet where the big Central African rainforest is located along with parts of the DRC and CAR.
They are making a new road in this area putting gravely sand over the white sand.  You can see the old ruts on the hill where other vehicles went before


There are just miles and miles of these sandy hills in Central Congo

Starting to prepare for the second season new ground and it will be time for harvest of the first rainy season so things will get busy soon.  The rains have slowed down between the rainy season, but you still get these afternoon rains where everyone finds somewhere to wait out the rains including the goats.  This one day these boys did this informal dance and singing session using an old palm oil drum for the beat.

Waiting out the rain.

These boys started up a informal dance and singing session using a palm oil container as a drum.

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