Saturday, July 21, 2012

Farmer-to-Farmer Program: Day 7-9 Saraya (Senegal)

Saraya is a village about 60 km northeast of Kedougou. Since trucks from the gold-mining industry and trade to land-locked Mali travel the same route, the roads are quite good to this remote village. We went to the hut of the president of one of the women groups to introduce ourselves, and all told, we ended up stopping by two more places to greet other important members of the community. The president and a couple of other ladies led us to the fields where we got the lay of the land.

One section is farmed by over 100 growers with the women's group Benk Hardy, and the other section has plots for over 40 growers belonging to another group, Tessito. The layout and organization are similar to the fields in Fadiga, but many of the same crops were further along here. They were probably benefiting from the extra rain in the area... but so were the weeds. This causes hefty competition for space, water (mentioned by many growers here as the biggest limiting factor), and other nutrients as well as creating reservoirs for diseases and insect pests to survive and increase in. In addition to the crops seen elsewhere, the Saraya fields have tomato, haricot bean, and sorrel (the source of that tasty drink I had in Tambacounda). Many of the same insects and diseases we've seen earlier occur in Saraya, too, but are present in differing degrees. On the positive side, termites aren't an issue - yet! - and the growers have been doing a better job keeping out the livestock (cows, pygmy goats, sheep, chickens, and donkeys), which tend to roam pretty freely all over Senegal.

Taking the time to visit fields in every location is really important. It helps you start to build a relationship with the growers, allows you to tailor training and recommendations to their specific concerns, and reinforces the importance of monitoring for good crop management. One village had access to chemical fertilizer. Another had big problems with what was only a minor pest in other fields. In Saraya, growers there had experience preparing homemade pesticides. They already knew how to make a solution out of the leaves of the locally-growing neem tree, the extract of which, in the developed world, is sold commercially as an effective insecticide/repellent.

Training in the village took place in the local school, where the more formal setting would help minimize interruptions and distractions. Other challenges we've faced throughout this assignment are language and basic literacy. While schools are taught in French, there is still a strong preference for the local language, and probably only 1 in 10 growers seemed comfortable conversing in French. Also, almost all of the growers were women, and it is not uncommon for girls to marry young in rural Senegal, so finishing school may be up to the discretion of their husbands. As such, my English words got translated into French by the Farmer-to-Farmer coordinator and then again into the local Pulaar by the KEOH representative. Besides everything taking three times longer to say, there were also gaps in understanding and approximations that had to be made. I worked out simple analogies with eating and human health to relate to crop protection. I thought hard about how to present highly technical concepts like relative differences in susceptibility, systematic scouting, and plant taxonomy. I consciously limited writing any words down. Instead, I relied very heavily on those English-teaching standards - miming and drawing pictures! My pathetic excuse for a leafhopper made me wish I'd taken that insect illustration class at Purdue. Hope the growers could make sense of my doodles! Fortunately for me, a few local "linkers" were in the audience. Similar to agricultural extension agents in the U.S., they - along with the KEOH rep - will be the ones following up in Saraya as well as going on to other groups to share my training and recommendations... and drawings. Eek!

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