7 weeks in

Things here have been going really well overall and really poorly in a few specific ways.

I feel as though I'm integrating reasonably well into the socio-cultural fabric of Ethiopia most of the time, and work is going really well overall in that I absolutely love what I do and it feels really meaningful to me.

On the downside, I have either bedbugs or fleas that I can't seem to get rid of which really gets into your head. I spent most of my day Sunday boiling every piece of clothing/linen/etc I own in a giant pot on the stove and swearing loudly while repeatedly scalding myself as I tried to ring it out and put it up on the line. I am planning to spend the next few days praying I've rid myself of the scourge because after this, I basically have no other recourse. They win. Pray for me.

Work has been a wonderful mixture of stressful and interesting. This is a crucial time of the season as we attempt to place ourselves in position to collect butt-tons (scientific term) of data come harvest time. This morning I got to watch my field managers receive a training I wrote on the proper protocol for using a hanging scale to measure wet harvest weights (wet harvest=the harvest before it's winnowed, threshed and dried. Think pile of fresh grass instead of pile of dried seed). I still try not to think about the fact that these harvest measurement methods I'm writing trainings on will be used to measure the harvests of over 4,500 farmers, because I'd probably never get it done. Plus, the program is structured such that there are so many checks and balances that it would be really difficult for me to develop anything completely inappropriate to the point that it was being rolled out at full scale. Trainings are drafted, edited, tested, revisted, tested again, revised again and sometimes tested a third time in successively larger experiments to iron out as many of the kinks as possible before they hit the field full-scale. This minimizes the impacts when things go wrong, and most importantly protects farmers from my (occasional) mis-steps.

I definitely struggle at times with the idea of my role here as someone from away in a country where there is so much incredible talent. I love the fact that my organization at its core does seem to have the best interests of the farmers we work with at heart, and that it manages to do that in a way that isn't doesn't feel completely patronizing or imperialist at times. Our approach is based on evidence and research, research to help farmers, which we couldn't do without farmers. As a environmental science degree-holder, I have been really impressed at the rigour with which the scientific method is employed, and the thoroughness of the statistical analysis on the back end of data collection. Having experienced academic fieldwork before, I am no stranger to the fact that experiments done in the real world can never be as neat and tidy or controlled in the same way that lab trials are, and I love that we are doing both in an attempt to further strengthen our conclusions. At the end of the season, if the methods we are suggesting farmers use really aren't better than what they were doing before, the numbers will show that and we'll switch to something else.

Anecdotally though, at this point I think we are going to get some really interesting harvest results. Heading to the field these days you can see an incredibly marked difference between row planted and broadcast planted fields. Row planted teff is much taller, with thicker stems and the stalks are absolutely loaded with teff heads. Broadcast planted fields are shorter and the stalks are thinner, I suspect due to overcrowding and soil nutrient competition. Interestingly, the downside to tall teff with fat seed heads is that the row planted fields experience "lodging" to a much greater degree than broadcast fields. Lodging is a fancy term for when plants topple over. The combination of late rains and heavy seed heads mean that lodging is the number one problem facing teff farmers generally. With the taller row planted stems, lodging is posing a major problem and I am a little worried it will impact our results because once the teff falls over, it will begin to rot if the head stays in contact with the ground and the grain will be lost.

This year we haven't focused too much on fertilizer application in our trials as altering the planting method appeared to have a higher potential impact on yields. That said, improved fertilization in teff is a major research area at the moment as it gains in popularity on the world stage. We have been recording the types of fertilizer farmers use on their crops (the most common is called DAP, which I believe stands for diammonium phosphate, providing nitrogen and phosphorus needed for healthy growth in low-fertility tropical soils). I haven't heard that over-fertilization is a major concern, know that teff is generally quite hardy, able to survive in both waterlogged and drought-prone conditions. One of the programs being worked on by another team at the moment is attempting to assess the rates of fertilizer use in rural parts of the country, because the government wants to know if it's recommendations are being implemented as widely as it would like but the results aren't in yet.

With all this data coming in, I don't envy the jobs of our overburdened data entry team, but I like to think they secretly all love their jobs as much as I love mine.