The Skin of the Earth

Topsoils, Elephants and Small-Scale Farmers

Actually, I do not know how many books have been written about the breakdown of civilizations due to the loss of topsoils, starting from the Babylonians and Assyrians and their salinization problems due to irrigation, over Phoenicians, Greek, Romans, etc. for everyone you can find resources that their fall is related to the loss of topsoil. I wonder about Somaliland, which problem was first, the governmental collapse or the loss of topsoil. I will find it out soon, especially if I would have aerial photos from the 40s, I think the British must have. What I was told at least is that they had 40 000 elephants living in Somalia around 1980, and all elephants ran away to Kenya due to the war. So probably the topsoil did the same. Anyway, now we all are related to topsoils all around the world. The topsoils which Somalis presently access are actually the topsoils which the Somali diaspora accesses in England, Netherlands or US, and the goods they access in these countries are based on access to topsoils in India, France and South America etc.. So in the age of globalization we all are dependent on all topsoils of the world. So we should care about them. Because the decline of topoils is considered as one of the greatest current threats to mankind, almost or even more than climate change. However, we don’t do. As the International Agricultural Assessment has shown, it is mostly the small-scale farmers with the highest productivity, who also care mostly for their topsoils. Most people, however, do not want to be small-scale farmers. I am not a small scale farmer, although I am an agriculturalist, but I prefer to work at a University. Others have different professions. Most farmers in Western countries are large-scale farmers. I think the problem with the finding that the small scale farmers are the most useful in combating the world food crisis is, that being a small scale farmer requires to reconcile oneself living on a very small income base. It also requires to give up realizing all other talents one has except the agricultural ones – although agriculture requires a lot of talents. I think the best idea in regard to agriculture was given by Gandhi – that one should work half a day as an agriculturalist and half a day as a lawyer, teacher, postman or whatever. Anyway, should I start every afternoon restoring the gully beside my house and removing the Parthenia weeds?

farmers, soils and vetiver

Well, when I was looking down from the plane on the surface of Somaliland, I was a little bit worried where to find the soils I was supposed to conserve. Nothing but stones and gravel, only sometimes interrupted by small strips of brownish maize plots, which possibly could qualify as soils from far. I thought, if that is now the skin of Somaliland, Somaliland must be deeply wounded. Nevertheless, arriving in Borama, I found the situation not that bad, quite a couple of deeper cambisols, vertisols, sometimes fluvisols. But little was left of the parkland-like landscape the British were writing about in the 40s, to be more precise, only on graveyards you find remainders of the probably original vegetation, which underlines the hypothesis, that the landscape suffers where the people suffer and vice versa.

I was wondering therefore, how the farmers would perceive the ideas of soil conservation - considering the fact that most of them have actually been pastoralists - and moreover, what they would think about the introduction of a new grass from Asia called vetiver, which is only there to nail the soil and can not even eaten by animals. In fact, the farmers were a suprise. Most of them were just beginners, who had switched from pastoralism to agriculture due to the reduction of the grazing base. Nevertheless, we found their awareness for soil conservation to be very high and their current practices of soil protection very sophisticated. Actually, almost every farmer uses at least four different methods of soil conservation, most of them stone bunds, earth bunds, ridges, some of them terraces which they renew every year, some do fencing with Aloe vera or stop water flow with branches from shrubs and trees, that I wondered if they even would need the vetiver. Asking them about that, however, actually almost every farmer immediately could identify a place, where to plant the grass, mostly eroding riverbanks, sometimes gullies, sometimes they suggested to try to replace earthbanks by the vetiver, since for the earth bunds they had to sacrifice the topsoil. Unfortunately now the rainy season is ending, and the second generation of the vetiver grass is not sufficiently multiplied, so maybe we cannot start now with bringing the vetiver to the farms, or just we will experiment with the first few farmers who are our friends, so that even a failure will not lead to a loss of credit. So, mainly we will continue multiplying the vetiver at the University campus, the remaining worry regarding the vetiver grass will be, if it will turn out to be economically feasible. 1000 plastic bags for the transplantation costs 100 Dollar, and it will need a couple of thousands for every farm, so if the farmers would invest this money on their own, has to be studied for the  future.