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.

Monday, January 27, 2014

Congo Update 30 Dec 2013

Greeting from the Congo

This is a little late but here we go in any case.  The first rainy season crops have been planted.  Here there temperatures are pretty constant throughout the year and since we are just about on the equator the days are 12 hours long year round.  The main difference is between wet and dry seasons.  The first and usually longer rainy season starts late-ish Sept through Dec and the second starts Late-ish Feb through June.  There is some rain between the two season, but last year there was no rain from July to September.

Got new equipment so we had to unload it and put it together first.  The equipment here comes from mainly tow sources - this Turkish company, Agromaster, that makes basic Ag equipment and a Brazilian company, Tatu, that makes these heavy duty tillage equipment.  No electronic, oil bath bearings instead of greasible and simple design - just what we need.  The planters are pneumatic which is nice, but not set up for no-till.  I do not want a to till planter to not do any tillage, but to reduce the amount of tillage and still be able to get the planter though all the surface trash left over from the huge amount of grass and vegetation you start with here so we don not have to overwork the ground and can preserve more of the organic matter which is important as a buffer to the soil acidity.



Unloading the equipment by hand.  Here it is nice to have extra hands.



Assembling a Tatu disk

 Assemblying the pneumatic planter

 Planting beans

Got the second season crops in.  Some replanted potato seed, some corn and a lot of dry beans - navy, pinto and reds.  The dry beans are a big push as they will go directly to the other program IPHD runs a school lunch.  This was one of the reasons to start the agriculture program - to produce locally food for this program.  The planting went a lot smoother and the rows a lot straighter as the tractor drivers have more experience now.  I am also trying out some new herbicides for here that ate more matched to the weed problems here.  The first indications are pretty good for sedge control with Halosulfuron.


Corn and dry beans in Nkoumou, Ngo

We only planted a few onions and carrots as the pneumatic vegetable planter has not arrived yet, but I bought two Earthway planters and put them in a seed container to use for trials, but they worked just fine to plant a couple of acres.  These planters are actually pretty adapted to conditions here and everyone wanted to have a go at them.

The insect pest pressure has not been that bad here with the beans mostly being affected the most.  The second season though there were these giant crickets that cut the new plants off at the ground.  Was a good time to explain economic threshold in pest control where you only treat for a pest when the damage done by this pest is grater than the cost of the treatment.  In this case it was not true as well as in the case of some beetles eating some of the bean leaves, but not many.  The thing is that they also catch these big crickets and eat them.    I didn’t try any of these but did try a palm grub - it was not terrible.

Some ladies with kids in tow that stopped by the farm to see what we were doing.

One final pic of another tractor including a plow that the local boys have made as our activities are changing the toys made.