Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

 Drop by drop, of wisdom
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7489620.stm

Burkina is a country that doesn't have weather in the sense we have weather. 
It has a climate - very hot and dry for half the year, and then very hot and 
wet.

The effects of climate change are already being felt out on the plain. It's 
gradually getting hotter and the wet season is getting shorter. Practically 
everyone is a subsistence farmer, and because they've been forced to adapt, 
they're leading the way in sustainable practices.

Burkina Faso garden
Each plant has a soil wall to keep water close to the roots, topped with 
mulch to stop evaporation

We have had only a taste of this with hosepipe bans in the hottest and driest 
of summers. Water butts and drought-resistant plants sold like hot cakes in 
2006, but last summer much of the UK had more water than it knew what to do 
with.

So what can we learn from the people who farm on the parched plains of West 
Africa?

Burkina Faso ranks 174 out of 177 on the UN's developing nations index, about 
as poor as a country can be. So I'm not ready for the devastating beauty of 
the place when I visit with Christian Aid. Sure, it's awful too - I see a 
dead body lying in the road and what can be worse than that?

At Zongou, I see a new reservoir, built by the townspeople, that has 
transformed 100 acres of savannah into an idyllic market garden.

Successful farms in the West do emanate a certain grandiose majesty. There is 
something beautiful about the scale of intensive farms, the way that a 
skyscraper is beautiful - slightly austere, but magnificent. The human scale 
of the succession of tiny, precious gardens sprouting rice, bananas, 
aubergine, cabbages is of a different order, the closest thing to paradise 
I've seen. But it's as close to paradise as it is to ruin.

Allie, 78, shows me his compost. He's dug two swimming pool-sized pits with a 
pick axe and a shovel, and filled them with a gigantic terrine of layers of 
animal dung, straw and vegetable waste to produce a weapons-grade organic 
fertiliser. I've made a smaller version at home in Oxfordshire, but instead 
of digging a pit, I've built a big box.

But plants need water more than anything else, and Alli also shows me how to 
make a demi-lune, a semi-circular vegetable bed with soil in a ridge around 
the edge to help trap the rain when it arrives.

Hosepipe ban

Demi-lunes are but one technique to make the most of decreasing rainfall, and 
one which allotment holders in the UK may try next time water shortages bite. 
Another is a system known as "drop by drop" to deliver water directly to the 
roots of their plants - a trick I plan to repeat as the summer heats up in 
the UK.

Dry stone wall in Burkina Faso
Stone walls prevent water run-off and erosion

In another settlement, I help the tribeswomen construct low dry-stone walls 
to stop the rainwater from running away.

When we finish, the women start singing, shuffling their feet rhythmically. 
They are a handsome race: tall and slender with the perfect poise that 
develops from carrying heavy things on their heads.

It's an enchanting scene, a cacophony of bright overlapping sounds and 
colours. The heat, nudging 45C, makes everything seem even less realistic. 
"They are saying they want to make you a chief," says the interpreter.

I fetch my guitar and sing the first two verses of The Windmill in Old 
Amsterdam, which they like. "You must come back," they tell me, and I promise 
I will.

What strikes me as most useful is the attitude the Burkinabe have to the 
land. They don't waste anything. Even water is seen as a crop to be nurtured 
and used respectfully. A far cry from the secret watering and neighbourhood 
fallouts we see during a hosepipe ban.

Later Allie and I plant some peanut seeds, tiny little drops in the huge 
landscape with its huge weather conditions. As we eke Allie's compost out 
over the peanuts, I hear myself saying a prayer.