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."