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August 9, 2007: Before the end of my Peace
Corps service in Mali, I received the news that I had been
accepted into a research internship position at the Rodale
Institute. Immediately, I was excited about the prospect of
postponing the job search for another eight months. After
an introduction to agriculture through subsistence farming,
this internship would give me the opportunity to learn more:
how and why things grow, how they can be grown sustainably,
and how to understand and interpret data from fields where
there are so many variables at play. Most of all, I was excited
to work outside with my hands.
This last point is most important to me because I like to
feel I’ve earned my paycheck, something I don’t
get from sitting in front of a computer hour after hour. It
just doesn’t seem right to me, especially after having
witnessed men in the village fields of Tchinchinome working
in anticipation of the rainy season for a meager reward. If
they were lucky enough to find work, they might get $2 for
the day after sweating over a few acres of land with a guru
beeri (literally, big iron—a hand-crafted
hoe) instead of the usual exchange of labor for a few shots
of green tea and a lunch of rice and sauce.
Living with subsistence farmers makes everything else seem
pretty unreal and abstract. How can we work without really
working? How can our economy function and boom on the reshuffling
of information and the buying and selling of intangible and
inane objects? I suppose in the end, it’s all about
what you and your community value. In the region of Gao, in
Mali, where I lived, these values were concrete and could
easily be seen in the local language. In Songhai (the language
spoken in the Gao region), the word for money and value, alman,
is the same as the word for cattle and livestock. The term
also means significance in everyday use; something’s
“significance” can be directly translated as its
“almana.”
Here at the Rodale Institute, much attention is focused on
the importance of cover crops in organic systems. Cover crops
and compost contribute nutrients and organic matter to the
soil and feed the microbes which, in turn, enrich the soil
and maximize the crops’ yield. This is very important,
but what immediately comes to mind is that not only is buying
and eating organic food a luxury, but using cover crops to
grow them is as well.
Appropriate "technology"
Where I was living in Mali neither chemical fertilizers,
fungicides, nor cover crops were used. Integrating cover crops
would be challenging, as water and financial resources are
the limiting factors in the area. With only three seasons—hot,
rainy and
dry—the ideal (and only) time to plant your crops is
right after the first rains. Sure, there are limited dry-season
crops, like beans and hibiscus, which are planted in the moist
ground of the cold season, but they, too, must wait about
five months for the rains to bring them to harvest.
Furthermore, the cattle-powered plow, not introduced in the
area until the 1980s, is not a baby stroller you can push
around the park. Adding a cover crop means many more back-breaking
days devoted to plowing, and at $5 a day paid to the plow
owner, most can’t afford the luxury. It means paying
the cost of the cover crops in addition to the approximately
23 cents a pound for seed rice (which is already expensive
for the ground they must cover), and $5 for the lunch and
tea preparations for the additional laborers per each day
in the field. Then there is the issue of irrigation, not only
for the rice, sorghum, or millet, but for the cover crop,
which most likely means paying fuel, labor and lunch for whoever
owns the “motopump” to come from the bigger village
to your field with his donkey cart to pump water from a shallow
hand-dug well (which is quite possibly dry).
Even if all these obstacles were surmounted and a cover crop
were grown, it would immediately attract all the squirrels,
birds, cattle, goats and sheep in the neighborhood, since
it would be the only green crop around. To prevent disaster
the farmer would need to be in his fields daily to make sure
the roaming livestock and wildlife didn’t cause any
problems, preventing him from supplementing his income elsewhere.
Or, a guardian would have to be found (and paid).
The land itself seems to be very fertile—even without
the benefits of cover crops—due, in large part, to the
flooding of the Niger River and the nutrients it provides.
In May 2006, all the field owners with land in the larger
central field of my village came together to renovate a canal
that hadn’t been communally worked in 10 years, so that
the water wouldn’t flood out any one person’s
field. This was done during the dry season, which is the best
time for this type of work, since people are not busy in their
fields. The temperatures were well up into the 100s, but this
did not stop the work from being done.
It seemed that every Saturday when the canal work was being
done, I would periodically hear shouts of “Gongoto!”
The kids would gather around the spot and pull a slimy, twisted
thing out of the wall or bottom of the bone-dry canal. It
was a live fish. When the waters recede these fish curl up,
stick their tails in their mouths and hibernate until the
next flooding of the Niger when they are free to turn into
“normal” fish again. These African lungfish, as
they are commonly known, are from the genus Protopteridae.
The fish’s protein waste is converted from ammonia to
a less toxic urea—a natural fertilizer. It is truly
amazing how living things adapt to their environment.
Deferring reality
It seems Americans don't notice the impact we make on our
surroundings in our daily lives. The neighborhoods in Winston-Salem,
North Carolina, where I grew up, look the same as they always
have. Sure, there are landfills and power plants and water
treatment plants but we don’t have to see them. We have
a good infrastructure that comes to clear our wastes away
once a week, and so week by week, our plate is cleared of
debris. On the other hand, in a 400- to 500-person village,
the effects of even a single person are almost immediately
visible. Every day, the women must go farther and farther
to collect firewood for cooking and palm reeds for mat-making.
Trash stays put and becomes a part of the local environment;
thin black plastic bags fill the thorns of the acacia trees
like leaves, and trash heaps become a child’s treasure
trove.
This example from Mali only takes into consideration a small
number of people. So why aren't there more visible signs that
America is such a wasteful society? Seeing how things work
in Mali highlights what our tax dollars, extensive infrastructure
and wealth are doing in America. It makes me realize just
how lucky we are to live where we do. Although, upon my return,
I realized there are a lot of areas in which we are deficient:
We don’t know who lives across the street because we
seal ourselves up in our houses; our families are spread all
over the country; and technology offers us convenience, but
not connections, not like those I saw and experienced in Africa.
There are a lot of things between these two countries which
can’t be compared, but the question is always in the
back of my mind: “How would this work in Mali?”
One night in Gao, my friends and I met a National Geographic
writer for drinks. This veteran reporter, who’d covered
government coups and everything else under the Africa sun
for something like 17 years, summed it up best. “The
North and South have been talking past each other for a long
time,” he said. Generally speaking, a major divide exists
between North and South, East and West, developed and developing
nations, First World and Third World. It’s as if each
side talks while the other is talking, or simply says what
the other wants to hear, or completely misunderstands.
Lessons in sustainablity
Back in America, I’m loving the open skies of Pennsylvania
and learning what role microbes play in agriculture. There’s
a message which plays over and over again, whether it’s
in a field of beans growing with 300mm of water a year, in
the symbiotic relationship between mycorrhizal fungi and crops,
in a cutworm’s attraction to a freshly planted corn
field, or in an African gongoto living in the cracked
dry clay: Nature is truly amazing and offers an endless supply
of lessons. We can either alter the environment to support
ourselves and our value system, or we can learn from our environment
– changing our values and ourselves to adapt to it.
This is true regardless of who we are or where we live. Adopting
sustainable agricultural practices, like those being researched
here at The Rodale Institute, is a plank in the bridge between
consumer-based American culture and the type of third-world
subsistence life evident in the villages of Gao, Mali. Instead
of always adding to our abundance, we Westerners must learn,
like the Malian villagers, to make the most out of what we
already have. Only when we cease to increase our demand can
we begin to reduce our collective footprint and start down
the path of living a globally sustainable lifestyle. 
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