we made it!

On Thursday, the Fearless Four went to tour an experimental farm just outside of Harare called Foundations for Farming. It is a 3 hectare farm, with enough compelling evidence to change people's traditional ways of doing things. A typical Zimbabwean farmer believes that you must at all costs grow maize every year, or you will be impoverished. But they neglect the most basic of principles- crop rotation. What has resulted are poorer, shorter crops with tiny cobs, and the farmers are becoming impoverished anyhow. The soil has become completely depleted of the nutrients that maize requires.


FFF is changing all that. Though experimentation, and test plots, they have been producing good crops year-round. They are changing the face of farming by making the ox-drawn plow obsolete. Now it is paying to hand plant the fields, but never working it. The plant-matter from all the previous crops stay exactly in place, on top of the soil. When it rains, the rain is no longer hard-packing the ground. The waste debris can slowly break down, over years, providing nutrients to the soil. The farmer now, using a string line and shovel, is hand-planting the crops in straight rows at precise spacings, adding compost, or antheap, or chicken soup (chicken manure soaked in water) or most preferably manure to the hole, placing the seed directly on top, and covering the seed. The most notable difference was the reduction of weeds, and also the timing of the crops. Late maize, seeded later than november 22, shows a loss of 120kg (250 pounds, in American)per hectare (a hectare is 2.5 acres, in American) per day late. In a country that only two years ago was starving to death, that's huge. People are starting to listen. If crops are seeded before the rains begin, they were huge, strong stalks with absolutely gargantuan cobs. But only if the farmer goes zero-till can they seed before the rains, because if there isn't adequate mulching layer, the soil will be too hard. In Zim, that mulch layer is called God's Blanket. The reward is proving to be huge.



In Zimbabwe, nothing under 600 hectares is called a farm. There's no irrigation, and not much by way of tractors. Zimbabwe farming used to be very cultural, driven by superstitions and such, but is changing. It's becoming more practical. All farmers used to burn their fields off after harvesting, to clean them up, but it was merely allowing weed seeds to grow, and the ash was fertilizing them! One year of weeds is seven years of problems, and in a country that has so many problems already, they don't need more.

Yesterday, Michelle and Shelise did some office administration work at a missionary family's house in Harare. Mike Boso and I did some electrical wiring for them. While we were there, I discovered that they want to do some landscaping in their backyard, to set up a safari-themed area to entertain groups of street kids around a fire-pit, wondering if I had any ideas!! God is so cool, He sent me to Africa design landscaping!! I'll work on it in my spare time when we return to Harare in three weeks.


Yup, you guessed it. We made it to Karanda. The sad part of that is that we had to say goodbye to our new friends, the Bosos. We arrived last night. The drive in was... interesting, to say the least. Most people in rural areas do not own vehicles, so we drove (very fast) past HUNDREDS, upon HUNDREDS of people walking on the highway, as we whizzed by at 100-120 km/h (that's 60-70 miles/hour, in american). Not one person ever got out of the way. It's just the way it is,out here. The first twoand a half hours were pot-holey pavement, the last 22 kms were rough, boulder strewn, narrow, impassible, pot-holey, but fairly solid, at least.

Karanda is basically a village unto itself, situated in one of the most rural, backwoods locations imaginable. The hospital is 130 beds, and people come from great distances to seek help here. Emergencies are happening all the time. One doctor, who just arrived a week ago, has seen two snake bites already. They say that right now is slow at the hospital, since it is planting season. Normally there are long lines of people waiting to be seen.

Our guesthouse is situated basically in the center of the village, and for now we are in a dormitory room to ourselves, but supposedly we are to move to a new room on Monday. Maybe THEN we can unpack our suitcases!! Water here is rationed, power comes and goes, but heat is readily available. The most useless item we took along was our winter coats- necessary at home, necessary in Chicago, but a complete pain ever since. Right now it's 31celsius (85) in our room, and I'd rather burn them than look at them. At least then their ashes could be used to fertilize somebodies garden.