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.
