Week 2 begins...

Sitting alone in a small, dimly lit restaurant constructed out of a mixture of bamboo and wood watching the rain pour down.  I was walking home from work when I was caught in the afternoon downpour, this is what I get for working late.  The rain comes like clockwork every afternoon and if you’re not indoors, watch out.  The walls of the restaurant, like many others in town, are lined with whole cow hides and the restaurant is blasting the standard local Ethiopian music, which I quite like.

Today began week two of work, and brought with it the return of almost all of the staff team from their respective New Years breaks.  The office is much fuller, and I was able to put faces to some of the names I have been trying to familiarize myself with over the course of the past week.  I’m terrible with names and have been making a special effort to remember them, but the cultural naming practises are difficult to keep up with.  Names like Ybalta, Hierotie and Antehunegne really have me challenging myself to come up with mnemonic memory techniques to cement them in my brain.  Programs are definitely kicking back into gear as well, and this morning also saw me sitting in on a meeting with the Field Managers and Field Coordinator for half of the Teff farmer trials I am involved in. 

Basically the team is structured as follows:  the District Partners (my team!) work in concert with the Field Coordinators (one for each of the two trial regions, East and West Gojam) to develop trainings and guide the execution of the trial.  Supervised by the Field Coordinator are the Field Managers who in turn supervise and train a team of Field Officers.  These field officers in turn work directly with farmers, delivering training in improved teff planting and management techniques.  The whole system is structured like a pyramid, allowing us to reach as many farmers as absolutely possible with each of the trainings we develop.  In the region I am tasked with focussing on, there is 1 field coordinator and 4 field managers.  These managers each supervise a team of 4-5 Field Officers, who in turn supervise between 100 and 200 small farmers each, spread over two districts.  Overall, this means we are currently reaching about 2,000 farmers in this region alone, which makes up approximately half of our farmer planting trial.  When I say the scope of the project is large, I’m not kidding.  The idea is to continue to scale up to be working with perhaps 10 times as many farmers next year depending on our results and pending government approval.

Our current trials involve promotion of improved planting techniques for teff.  The current popular planting methods have most farmers using broadcast planting, which involves spreading the seed by taking handfuls and sprinkling them uniformly over the soil, or “broadcasting” them.  This technique distributes the seed evenly over the field and farmers will often use 25-50kg of seed per planted hectare.  When the plants sprout, they crowd each other and compete for access to limited soil nutrients.  This crowding means that farmers are getting less bang for their buck per planted seed, as increased competition means less actual grain produced at the end of the season. 

To address this problem, we are running trials promoting row planting methods.  Farmers are instructed to measure out evenly spaced rows within their fields, and to use a low-tech seeding technique (involving jamming a pen ink tube into the top of a water bottle to make a small hole through which seeds can be squeezed in an even stream along the planting line) to seed their fields in uniform rows.  Research has shown this technique to give significantly higher crop yields per planted seeds, as farmers can cover a hectare with 3-5kg by planting in rows (compared to 25-50kg with broadcast seeding). 

The major barrier to adoption of this technique is the fact that it simply takes more effort on the part of the farmer to carefully mark out planting rows and then deposit the seed along them.  Broadcast seeding is quicker and easier and has long been the preferred methodology, but we are hoping to show via these trials that row planting is worth the added effort.  This can be a tough sell, given the average rural farmers’ already incredibly demanding workload but ideally our trial results will speak for themselves.

The government also has it’s own program of row planting promotion, but this has also met limited success.  The idea of this trial is to compare the government’s methods of training delivery to ours, as well as to a control group that received no training and is simply planting using the traditional methods.  Are farmers actually learning from the planting trainings they are attending, and is this reflected in their yields at the end of the season?  There is lots of data to collect and analyze before big question like these can be answered definitively.

The meeting this morning involved a Training of Trainers style methodology.  The idea is to train the field coordinator and managers on the methods they will use to train their respective field officers.  When delivering trainings on things like best planting or fertilization techniques, the field officers would then deliver those trainings directly to farmers.  At this point in the season though, all the fields have been planted and farmers are doing things like weeding and fertilizing.  In order to compare the results from our in-field planting trials, we need to set up a randomized sample of farmers from both the participant and non-participant control groups, and take then take measurements of harvest yields from small sample areas within each plot.  The training delivered tomorrow will teach the field officers how to set up these sample areas within the planted fields of their farmers groups.  By comparing the yields between our methods, the government methods, and the control group, we will be able to figure out which planting technique will allow farmers to spend the minimum amount of money on seed, for the maximum yield results.

I feel as though a diagram would have been helpful in trying to explain all that, but this is what I’ll be spending about half my time on over the next few months, in a nutshell.  The rest of my time will be devoted to working at an agricultural research facility, helping to coordinate research and gather data on other planting techniques, fertilizer types/methods and management strategies.  

I have the inkling all this is going to keep me very, very busy which, fortunately, is exactly the way I like it...