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  • From: "Ben Martin Horst" <ben.martinhorst@gmail.com>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [permaculture] Zai holes
  • Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 12:18:30 -0700

For all those aficionados of swales, hugelkultur, and the like, here's
another fascinating low-tech addition to the permaculture toolkit.
(Article snipped from salon.com)

A tree grows in the Sahel
by Andrew Leonard

Around 1980, Yacouba Sawadogo, a farmer in the parched Yatenga region
of Burkina Faso, started experimenting with the ancient local
tradition of "zai holes" or planting pits, as a way of restoring
limited fertility to utterly degraded land. He increased their
dimensions to about 10 inches wide and 8 inches deep and stuffed them
full of organic fertilizer such as manure and crop residues.

The manure attracted termites, which dug tunnels that helped break up
the soil, allowing rainfall to flow through the ground and collect in
the zai basin. The result, according to researchers who have studied
the spread of zai hole planting practices throughout the region, has
been extraordinary. Hundreds of thousands of hectares of semi-arid
land that could no longer be cultivated have been restored to
productive use...

The rest of the article is at
http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2006/10/04/zai_holes/index.html



  • [permaculture] Zai holes, Ben Martin Horst, 10/05/2006

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