Trop Ag

Agricultura Tropical, as they might say in someplace they speak spanish.  Going into my semester in Kenya, I actually had no idea what the classes were.  Like I signed up for the semester without knowing what courses were being taught.  I was in it more for the study abroad experience.  When I told friends and family that I was studying abroad, they're first question:  "what will you be doing there?"  To which I would non-descriptively answer:  "Field work."  So then I decided to look at the titles of the courses, and of all of them, Tropical Agriculture seemed the most interesting.  After actually taking the course, I can tell you it was very interesting, although I think Paula's was still my favorite (in terms of content and goals).  But Trop Ag (as they cool people call it) was a close second.

WHY?

1)  Cheryl Palm (the Professor) and Steve Wood (the TA) were really cool people - both Columbia University affiliated.

2)  Much like Paula's course, it had a practical element.  

We were commissioned with analyzing the health of six farms outside the town of Embu in the agricultural region south of Mount Kenya.  We were supposed to go to Kisumu during this course, but since Raila Odinga is from that region - and he lost the presidential election - Princeton was afraid we'd get caught up in rioting (pretty sure no rioting happened in that course).  Cheryl works in Kisumu for the UN Millenium Villages Project.  Basically, the worst thing about poverty is food security.  So, the UN set up project villages in some of the most poverty-stricken regions of Africa, representing different agroclimate zones found world-wide.  They're seeing what works, what doesn't, and if cost-effective strategies can be employed on a national/global level to increase food security.

We split into three groups:  Nutrients, Soils/Carbon, Biodiversity.  I was in the (BEST GROUP) Nutrients group.  We called ourselves Nutz, nbd.  As Nutz, we spent our time on the farm asking the farmer(s) questions about what fertilizers they put on their farm and how much vegetation they harvested from their farm plots.  Essentially, we wanted to create a farm balance for the basic crop nutrients nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K).  Here's an example of the type of map we needed to make for each farm.

Nutrient balance diagram for the last farm sampled in Embu, created by ME!  They had no livestock (because they were super old and livestock are hard to take care of) but 

While this looks like just a simple easy picture a kid could make in MS Paint (because it is, although this was made in Word, not MS Paint...), the calculations behind the colorful arrows are actually really annoying.  There was a lot of guess work and a lot of assumptions made because the farmers didn't always know the exact amount of things harvested and the weights were sometimes measured in things like wheelbarrows.  If you want the short speech:  most of the farms are nutrient deficient on most of their farm plots, especially plots like the woodlot (used to harvest timbre) and napier grass (harvested and fed to livestock like cows, sheep, and goats).  Unlike the Maasai who open graze their animals, the agriculturalists in Embu have zero-grazing livestock, meaning the livestock are penned up and fed in place.  Livestock are basically a sink of nutrients, which kind of sucks.  Anyone who took basic biology should remember that ~10% of energy is lost between trophic levels, so essentially raising animals is less efficient that raising crops and eating those directly.  So why are people not vegans?!?  Well, in some places, humans can't eat the vegetation produced by the soil (e.g. more arid climates like North Kenya's Turkana region where milk and blood from cattle are a major source of calories; the cows can eat the crappy vegetation and the humans can eat the animal byproducts).  Also, I guess meat tastes good (FUN FACT:  a few nights ago I had a dream that I ate a hot dog and I woke up feeling so horrible for myself; for those that don't know, I've been "vegetarian" since last August, with the exception of a few slip ups).

Meeting and talking with the farmers was really cool.  All but one of them spoke English, and they were all very willing to help us learn about their farms.  Another FUN FACT:  most farms in Africa are smallholder, meaning small acreage.  The largest farm we visited was 6 acres (and the smallest was 1 acre).  But these are the farms that produce the coffee / tea (major Kenyan exports) for the world.  To me that's amazing.  Growing up in Illinois, I've seen the huge farms with vast stretches of corn (called maize in Africa) and soybeans as far as the eye can see.  The Kenyan farms (with the exception of the pineapple farms, which are controlled by fruit companies like Dole) were so small and so diverse.  Every farm produced at least 3 different crops that they sold to markets (mostly maize, beans, and bananas; smaller cash crops being khat, aloe, tea, coffee, macadamia nuts, and more).  There were also the security foods they kept in their fields for if there family needed extra food during a drought.  This was food like sweet potato, cassava, and yams (FUN FACT ABOUT YAMS:  The yams we have in the US, unless bought at an authentic African grocery store, are probably not real yams.  They're probably a variant of sweet potato.  When Africans were enslaved in the US, they were fed this white flesh sweet potato that reminded them of the yams from the homeland, so they called it yams, and thus yams entered the American vernacular to describe a potato-like food that is not in fact yams.).  These security foods can store in the soil up to five years without spoiling so they're actually really nice for places that have food security problems.  Thus, farmers scatter them about their farms.

Village kids that helped us count plants (part of the assignment was counting plants, no joke) on Ezekiel's farm.

Boys picking guava on Ann's farm.

Me and the daughter of Ann (one of the farmers)

Getting served tea after data collection at Editer's farm.

Maize and bean field.  It actually doesn't hurt either crop to intercrop them and it's good for soil fertility (since beans are legumes that fix nitrogen).

So we were staying in Embu for a week (during which time I watched the entire first and second season of Game of Thrones and am now addicted).  The hotel - Izaak Walton - was hilarious.  It was marketed as the best place to stay in Embu (which, you know, shouldn't really say a lot in the first place, Embu's not really a hoppin' town).  It was worse than advertised, which Cheryl told us is how you should approach anything in Africa.  The pool was advertised as Olympic-sized, to which I reply, "what Olympics?  1896? (FALSE:  The 1896 Olympics were swum in the open sea)."  Probably the worst part was the crappy internet.  When we were in Nairobi, we stayed at the Maasai Lodge, that had internet comparable in speed to Mpala.  At the Izaak Walton in Embu, the internet barely crawled along.  This would be fine, you know, if we were actually on vacation there.  But we needed to do work!  Our project required we look up nutrient contents of various crops and livestock byproducts.  We also had to register for classes, and any recent Princetonian knows, even when you click the register button right as class registration opens, you can still get locked out of classes.  I was, in fact, locked out of one EEB class I wanted next semester; but I did get into a documentary filmmaking class, so that should be fun.  The one redeeming quality of the hotel was its food:  delicious omelettes every morning, delicious garlic bread for lunch, etc.  YUM.  YUM.  IN.  MY.  TUM.  TUM.

Sadly, Cheryl had to leave us early because of a family emergency.  When we returned to Mpala without her, just Steve now, we had about 5 days to write a one-page report on a specific topic - biodiversity, nutrients, or carbon/biomass - a five-page report on another and then contribute a section of a paper written by the whole class in our group.  So, I wrote my first one-page paper about carbon, my five page paper about biodiversity, and helped write the nutrient section of the final class paper.  RIGHT?!?!  THAT'S A WHOLE LOT OF WORK!!!  Again, these courses have taught me how to put peddle to the metal and just get the assignment done.  

We turned in our paper on Tuesday morning and then went in to Nanyuki to do some last minute souvenir shopping.  Then we came back and played with some kids in the village before going on our final sundowner.  More about my closing emotions on my semester abroad in a later post.  For now, this has been Erisa Apantaku with a special report on "Trop Ag."  Stay tuned in the immediate future for:  "The Final Post."

NNP and the Maasai

After completing Andy's course (but not really because we still had to write a 6-8 page paper due 2 weeks later), we headed to NAIROBI.  Nairobi is the capital of Kenya.  It's also the only city that contains a national park in its city limits (STEP UP YOUR GAME PORTLAND, OREGON.).  I was excited to leave Mpala because the beetles were RIDIC.  Like actually.  So I was excited to go to Nairobi where we'd be staying in a hotel - hopefully more bug free than a research centre.  And for the most part it was.  Devika and I were in "Guest House," which was like a condo.  It would've been a great hang out space for all twelve of us, but we were SO BUSY.  What were we doing you ask?  Oh, just savin' the world, one transect at a time.

But actually, here's what we were doing:

Paula Kahumbu - a former Princeton graduate student of Andy Dobson - was our professor for this part of the course.  If you check out her website, you'll see she's really into policy, activism, and conservation.  So our project was aimed at this:  reconciling community needs with wildlife needs wherever possible for a potential WIN WIN situation.  The southern edge of Nairobi National Park (NNP) is a common grazing area for migratory wildebeests (yes, the animals that killed Simba's father), as well as a dispersal zone for other grazers (like zebra, eland, buffalo, etc.).  The park is currently not fences, but cattle herders from the surrounding community are not allowed to graze inside the park by law.  During the wet season, everything's fine because there's grass everywhere for everyone.  It's during the dry season, when grass outside the park is overgrazed, that things get rough for the community.  Additionally, during rainfails - like in 2009 - people are truly devastated.  So our goal was to do vegetation, insect, and animal surveys inside and outside the park to compare biodiversity.  Basically, we were trying to see, should we let grazing happen inside the park sometimes?  Would that be bad for animals inside the park?  Because ultimately, the way things are right now, the community kind of hates that they get the short end of the stick (they're animals can't graze inside the park, but park animals can graze wherever they want) 

Another major source of conflict between the community and NNP is the lions.  NNP attracts tourists because they want to see lions.  But the lions sometimes cross outside of the park and snatch members livestock.  Traditionally, when a lion kills livestock, Maasai warriors go kill the lion.  So the WIN WIN would be:  lions don't kill livestock, lions don't get killed.  BUT HOW?!?!?  HOW STOP A LION FROM EATING A DELICIOUS COW?!?!?  Answer:  Richard Terere.  I had the pleasure of hanging out with this cool, smart, 13-year-old boy who invented lion lights from the turn signals of a motorbike.  Basically he realized lions didn't frighten from solitary lights, but moving/flashing lights would keep lions away.  Check out his TEDx talk here; YOU WILL NOT REGRET IT.  Anyway, he had a lot of cool things to say and it was interesting seeing the argument - human-wildlife conflict - from his side.  Paula heard about his invention when she was talking to the community about other conservation things and took him under her wing sort of.  Now he's going to the best school in Nairobi and wants to be a aerospace engineer (I made sure to plug the MAE major at Princeton!)  You hear about these stories all the time.  I truly believe everyone on this planet is capable of innovation.  If it weren't an inherent property of humanity, humans wouldn't have evolved to the state we're at now.  I just wish everyone had the opportunity, and someone to take notice of incredible ability and foster it.  That's the key.

But I digress.  So we were counting plants.  More counting plants.  But actually, I was in the mammal group and had the pleasure of counting poop instead.  Since the park is only open at certain times during the day, we couldn't go on early morning or late night game drives.  So instead we did poop transects where we identified and counted the poop we saw on a 30 meter transect.  We also set up camera traps, which are basically cameras that take pictures when they detect motion.  This way we hoped to catch certain things that only really become active at night.  And WE DID!

Paula is super important / connected in the world of Kenyan conservation and policy.  I mean, she has her own website for goodness sakes.  (SIDE NOTE:  She’s like always on her phone that’s how busy she is.  At first I thought it was rude.  I was like, “come on lady, you’re here to teach us, not email people!”  But then I realized she was just super busy because she is the busiest person in Kenya.  Our course was the week leading up to the presidential inauguration, and after our course ended, we learned that Paula had WRITTEN a substantial part of Uhuru Kenyatta’s speech.  It was an honor just to have a class taught by her.)  Anyway, since she’s important, she has a lot of important friends that came along with us into the field and helped us collect and analyze our data.  One was Dino Martens, who I had cited in a paper earlier in the semester.  He’s basically a super genius.  He knew all the plants and insects we encountered.  Another was Jeff Worden.  Basically, they were super helpful.

(SIDE NOTE:  Sorry, this blog post sucks.  I don’t know.  I’ve lost the magic…  If you’re bored of reading, skip ahead to the section entitled: BEGIN READING HERE.)

Anyway, after we did the sampling, we had to give a presentation to the community about our findings.  The presentation was split into two major sections:  impartial data presentation and debate.  I was in the debate side (those who know me may know I like to argue and love classroom debates!), arguing for keeping cattle out of NNP.  It wasn't really a real debate because we didn't go back and forth at all, it was more just an argumentative presentation.  My colleagues Amy and Suchana were also on the AGAINST side.  It was funny because our major argument against grazing was regulation, but that's something we didn't feel comfortable saying in our presentation:  "hey, we can't let you do this because, you know, you give a man a yard, he'll take a meter" (that's not the expression, but that's what I said at like 2 in the morning when we were working on our project).  Anyway, we based our argument off the fact biodiversity was severely reduced outside the park, the fact that cattle destroy the aesthetics of the park (and could scare away animals that are fearful of humans/cattle like rhinos), and disease transmission between wildlife and cattle.  Suchana came up with a pretty good solution to no cattle in the park, but still helping the cattle:  MOW THE GRASS.  The grass inside the park is actually not that palatable for grazers.  The argument for allowing cattle in the park was basically there's plenty of it and it will be better grass if we let them in.  But again, regulation is a beyotch.  So why not mow the grass - so fresher, tastier grass can grow back - and give it to community members with cattle.  That way, it's way easier for the park to maintain biodiversity.  It sounds kind of silly, but it's worth a shot, especially if climate change keeps frakking up the weather such that droughts are more frequent and severe.

It was funny because we were worried we would “lose” the argument because most of the evidence seems to say that with controlled grazing inside the park things would still be okay (and by ‘things,’ I mean the ecosystem).  The night before the presentation, we were up until 2 AM preparing the presentation.  It was my fault, because I decided to start pouring through extra material that night trying to support our argument.  I got about 4 hours of sleep before I had to wake up to practice the presentation with Amy and Suchana.  I was SO TIRED.  I was worried that in my exhausted state I would fail the presentation.  On the way to the National Park – where we were giving the presentation in a conference room – I was busily compiling the different presentation slides from everyone’s separate presentations (data, for, and against) IN THE CAR.  I thought I was going to vomit looking at the screen.  I was scatterbrained, I wasn’t thinking straight.  I started to come ‘round to reasonable thinking once we got into the conference room and set up the presentation.  When we first got there thirty minutes before the presentation began, no one was there.  Paula had invited practically EVERYONE she knew to the presentation.  Being a super important person in Kenya, this had the potential to be many people.  When she taught the course last year, the focus was on a road that was being developed and that would cut into the park.  Obviously this brought a lot of attention and there were over 100 community members that showed up to the students’ presentations.  My hopes (of not having to give a presentation in front of a bajillion community members) were dashed when people started showing up.  Most of them were involved with KWS (Kenyan Wildlife Service), or were conservationists/ecologists or just general students.  The only members of the “community” (i.e. the people that want to graze in the park) were Richard Terere and Nickson Parmisa.  So essentially we “won” by default because most of the audience already agreed with us that you can’t let cattle in the park.  My hope is that KWS starts exploring the opportunities to lessen the devastation of livestock during drought years. 

After we gave our presentation, we went to Dino’s neighborhood, which is random artist collective on the other side of a gorge that you cross by wire bridge.  At the collective, everything is recycled glass art.  The buildings are built into the curve of rocks found naturally there.  Basically, it’s a commitment to sustainability and living with nature instead of forcibly carving civilization out of every inch of soil on the planet.  Sadly, there were many mosquitoes there and I got bit up and down my whole body.  Happily, we saw / learned how to make glass beads and then purchased some glass beads.  Elora (my sister), get excited; I bought you beads (BEES?!?!).  It was cool.  I thought my roommate Clare would LOVE IT since she’s a hippy, and awesome. 

So you’d think, after collecting data for four days, spending 24 hours to prepare a presentation, giving said presentation (flawlessly might I add), we’d get the afternoon in the bead store and then chill out.

FALSE.  FRAKKING FALSE.  Going into the course, we knew we’d have to write a paper collaboratively, all 12 of us, due the day after our presentation.  What we were told would be a short paper (1-2 paragraphs per person), suddenly became long (1-2 pages per person).  Add to this the fact that we still hadn’t finished our papers for Andy’s class (that’s right, another 6-8 page paper on the way), we spent the night working.  Essentially two super late nighters in a row.  The next day, I was completely spent.  If these courses have taught me anything, it’s how to take practically no data, put it through the bullsh*t machine that is my brain, and spit out acceptable writing.  I suppose this is an important skill to have…

(BEGIN READING HERE.)

The most interesting thing about this course was the human element.  Before it, we’d only done hard science and not talked at all about policy.  As part of the mammal group, a lot of my job involved talking with the Maasai herdsmen – notably Nickson Parmisa, a chief in the local government, about their feelings on cattle grazing in the park and wildlife.  All of them loved having the wildlife around, but saw the inequity of the grazing situation.  Another thing that doesn’t help is that the Kenyan people don’t “own” the wildlife; legally, the government (KWS) does.  So if they don’t benefit from it, but only suffer from it, how can you expect the Kenyan people to be chill with this inquity?  Speaking to Nickson, he went through a long list of droughts he had lived through and the different tactics he had to take to feed his cows – in some cases walking with them for 3 days straight to a place of greener pasture.


Nickson, a chief in the local government, also told me a lot about the Maasai.  Although the culture has changed to adapt to an evolving world, they still maintain a lot of traditional ceremonies.  One that stuck out to me was a sort of transition from youngish adult to more respectable adult (I think?  I don’t really know what marked the transition, but I think it was turning 30 or something).  (Okay, I’m severely forgetting the intricacies of the ceremony he told us, but here’s my best shot:)  They had a big feast and the men all ate meat together.  Then they left and the women came.  If any woman touched the pig carcasses, she had cheated on her husband before.  (I think that’s it.) 

He also told me about the diseases that affected the cattle, such as MCF (malignant catarrhal fever) and ECF (east coast fever).  I asked him about Q fever (see my previous blog post for more info on Q fever).  He said he’s never heard of it.  I wondered how prevalent Q fever was in the populations (animal and human) in this region.  If Princeton was worried about it, it must be a sort of big deal (maybe?).  I think that would make a cool project.  My thesis project is on the prevalence of Leptospirosis in sea lions:  what dictates what animals get sick and die?  Has anyone looked into antibody titres of zoonotic diseases in herdsmen outside NNP?  Maybe that should happen?  I don’t know.

A cool thing about the culture I learned the hard way:  older / more respected people greet other members of the community by touching their head.  So, an adult would great a child by toughing his/her head.  I didn’t realize this and began shaking hands with all these kids and they gave me the strangest look.  Eventually, one mother started laughing and said, sticking out her hand to mock a hand-shake, “they don’t know this way.  They only know this way,” said as she learned her head forward.  I felt like such an idiot!  I also felt bad because when I had shook the hands of the kids it felt sort of like I was subverting their cultural norms and I didn’t want to be offensive.  But the fact the Mom just laughed at me was probably a good sign that nothing was too serious.

I’ll leave you with a story from another Maasai – this time a KWS officer named Jackson Kuyoni.  He was really interested in birds, so I asked what spurred this passion.  Jackson told me that before getting circumsized, he had to kill severely birds that would then be made into a colorful headdress to be worn on the day of the ceremony.  But he loved the birds because of their color, and after killing three he told his family he wasn’t going to kill anymore.  This caused some strife between himself and his father and grandmother, who both wanted him to carry on the tradition.  But Jackson wouldn’t budge.  Eventually, his family let him go bird-headdress-less, so at the ceremony he was the only boy without one.  And he started a trend!  He’s the oldest in his family and his younger brothers didn’t have to attain birds either.  Jackson’s happy about this since some of the birds they have to sacrifice are threatened or endangered.