Conservation Agriculture and Sand Dams

Since we’ve posted mostly pictures on this blog, and in our typical day-to-day MCC work/life we typically don’t take as many pictures, I’ll take some time to write a bit in this blog post. 

It’s been raining hard in Nairobi, April is the wettest month of the year.  Things are always green here, even during the dry season, but it’s nice to have the dust settled.  It slows travel sometimes, a heavy rain on Nairobi streets can cause extra back-ups.  Schools are on one of their between-term breaks, so that slows down our activities a bit also.  Schools are about half of my work here, I’ll write more about work at those schools in another post.  The other half of my work is in rural areas, and I’ll write a bit about that here.

I wrote a short article about these organizations for Intersections (the “theory and praxis quarterly” journal published by MCC) recently, which is a more focused explanation of their work, and explains a few things not included here.  The pdf version has the entire issue on natural resource management.

I (Doug) was out in Ukambani (the Machakos and Kitui region, several hours east of Nairobi) recently, so will report on those activities first. 

Ukambani shown in shaded green

MCC works through local partners, and MCC Kenya has some 25 partners across the country.  Two of those are SASOL and UDO, both local organizations that work with farmers to improve livelihoods and increase food security.  These organizations have been known for promoting sand dams, but they are more fundamentally concerned about different ways that communities in ASALs (arid and semi-arid lands) can have improved livelihoods.  As Mutinda, the director at SASOL, told me this week, as population and cultivation increases in the best land around Africa, attention will increasingly turn to large ASALs as the key areas that can feed and house the continent.  So they see sand dams as one tool for those communities, and they increasingly are focusing their programming on other activities such as conservation agriculture. 

I work with SASOL and UDO on two aspects of their work: conservation agriculture, and sand dams.  Both organizations are part of a larger conservation agriculture project “Scaling up conservation agriculture in East Africa” – one of about a dozen partners in Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania funded through Canadian Food Grains Bank (through the Canadian government) that is looking to impact at least 50,000 farmers.  This project is just starting, so I’ve been helping the partners as they formulate their project plan, set their budgets and timetables, and in general get their plans in order for approval.  They are just starting their work on this project, both having just finished baseline surveys of several hundred households, and starting the selection process for farmers who will start CA.  CA here is focused on rainfed farming (vs irrigation) for small scale farmers.  As with all CA, it focuses on three basic principles of crop production: keeping soil covered with mulch, no (or reduced) tillage, and crop rotation/intercropping.  In working with the partners, it’s interesting to have many discussions about what technical practices work or don’t work in CA (for instance, are herbicides necessary to control weeds, which are often a larger problem in CA?), and what practices effectively increase farmer adoption of CA (for instance, does giving free seeds the first year encourage adoption?).  And it’s interesting just to learn about agriculture in Africa – a recent article in the Economist gives an interesting (and optimistic) picture of agriculture on the continent.  And as I travel more often to the towns of Kitui and Kola, and neighboring regions, I enjoy the warm hospitality and the interesting stories of my Kenyan colleagues!

As mentioned earlier, SASOL and UDO are well known for their work on sand dams.  There are lots of good accounts of sand dams, for example CFGB has a short video on sand dams, and our friend and colleague from Harrisonburg Dr. Wayne Teel has written a good account of sand dams at UDO.  As with all things, there are enthusiastic “believers” and “non-believers” in sand dams, and many in the gradient in between those two extremes.  Although it is easy to observe the benefits of functional dams, there are questions about how many sand dams end up functioning well, and how the benefits compare to the considerable invest costs of starting a sand dam.  I am helping UDO and SASOL starting a rigorous evaluation of some aspects of sand dam effectiveness that will help answer some of those questions.  Included in this evaluation is a needed assessment of the quality of the water from sand dams.  We know that sand dams can store a lot of water under good conditions, but there is very little information on whether that water is (for instance) high or low in bacterial contamination.  The next dry season (Aug-Oct) will see me in the field a lot in Ukumbani helping to do this evaluation. 

Ukambani has the distinction of being known worldwide in circles of development workers and academics thinking about issues of sustainability, population, and agriculture.  This is largely due to the publication of the seminal book “More People, Less Erosion”, essentially arguing that the local environment and agriculture production has improved despite an increase in population pressure.  In short, they argue for a “boomster” rather than “doomster” view of population – that increased population presents opportunities rather than a threat.  Naturally, there are detractors to this view.  And there are other, newer threats to livelihoods in the region, the most obvious being climate change.  No farmer that I’ve met doubts the reality of climate change, in particular they comment on how the rains used to be predictable, but now they are never sure when (or if) it will rain.  A selling point for conservation agriculture is as a technique that is appropriate for the changing climate conditions.

Ukambani itself is an interesting region (find an interesting description of the region here).  The people in this area are the Akamba, a bantu group.  During colonial times, the area was “Machakos reserve”, in other words a place set aside for native Africans as it was not one of the more fertile areas of the country in demand by the white settlers.  Some settlers did set up coffee farms in the hills, but these largely disappeared when coffee prices decreased.  Also disappeared is the wildlife, there is a classic account of one of the early game wardens supervising the shooting of 1000 rhinos in a short period.  There are no rhinos left there, and generally no other large mammals, unlike the Athi plains to the west where wildebeest, giraffes, etc can still be seen wandering openly.  Tsavo borders Ukambani to the south, so animals do occasionally wander up from there, such as groups of elephants last year when food or water got scarcer in Tsavo.  Conflicts also occur along the eastern region as Somali herders run into conflicts with farmers about land use issues, especially along the Tana River.

So that is one description for what takes much of my time here in Kenya.  As anybody knows who has been to Africa, or many other areas of the world, life occurs at a different tempo here, and with different priorities.  While staying busy, I’m grateful to have a few years without the typical rush of an academic year!  Much time is spent relating to people – even when there are deadlines or meetings, it is always first priority to spend adequate time talking with people about their lives, families, country, etc.  The partners I work with have many times expressed appreciate for MCC’s commitment to walking with them in the long-term, and for valuing the personal relationships which are of paramount importance in Kenya.