permaculture

[Marimike6@cs.com]

>My youngest brother is most likely going with his family to Zambia later
this year as missionaries. As part of the mission, he would be helping
the local community farm. My brother doesn't have a gardening or
farming background other than the family garden we grew up with. I
hooked him up with some introductory permaculture books, but I was
wondering if any of you would know of some resources for him on Zambian
climate, local foods, indigenous edible plants, indigenous gardening
practices, and the like. Are there any Zambian Permaculture courses or
anyone doing Permaculture in Zambia that anyone is aware of? 

Abram-- Here are a couple of interesting web resources on sustainable farming 
in Zambia:

http://www.sarpn.org.za/documents/d0001876/index.php

http://carezambia.org/sector.asp?secID=14

Here's what the Nations Encyclopedia has to say about small farming in 
Zambia:

"The majority of Zambia's population engages in subsistence farming. The 
principal subsistence crops are corn, sorghum, and cassava, while the main 
cash 
crops are tobacco, corn, sugarcane, peanuts, and cotton."

This tells you it's a lot like North Carolina, only without the winter. 
Sunflower seed production is practised, and could be a good supply of oil. 
But it 
sounds like they mostly have crops that survive in poor soil. So I would look 
more into strategies that recycle and compost stray organics. I'd be willing 
to 
bet your brother will find washed out soils in need of nutrients. 

This kind of dirt makes it hard to scratch out a living. Cotton prices are at 
rock bottom. Around here we have white, sandy, powdery soil that people are 
growing blueberries and wine grapes in. We haven't found too many field crops 
other than soy, cotton, peanuts and tobacco that will flourish here. 
Capricious 
rains even make corn a big gamble, so you should probably look into Zambia's 
distribution of rain over the year. 

So the other approach would be gardening in small, intensively prepared 
vegetable plots.

I hope this helps. It's just some stuff I got off the web.

Michael