Fieldtrip!

From Tuesday3 till Thursday 5th December I  was  invited to join the Meta Meta team on their field trip to the South, direction of Awassa.  3 guys, two of them Spanish, one Dutch. We stayed in a hotel in Arsinegelle, a nice provincial town, relaxed, compared to Addis Ababa. 

The hotel was clean, good bed, cold and warm running water (which we haven’t got at home yet) and it cost 170 birr per night, which is the equivalent of 7 euros. Amazing! 

As I concluded earlier: there are two financial circuits here, one for the rich and one for the poor, the majority.

I have thoroughly enjoyed the trip:  Diego driving  us – in an old non air-conditioned, dust catching Lada that didn’t get faster than 80 km an hour - through the beautiful countryside. There were rich areas, rich from an agricultural point of view, with many stacks of recently  harvested teff, the main food crop here. 

In one area  they grow wheat in an almost English looking country side with scattered big trees.  There were a few combine harvesters at work. Quite a contradiction with the dry and less fertile Acacia landscape near lake Langano.

My reason to come along was to learn more about the sustainable agriculture projects that are going on here. The project Ruben Borge is working on, soil improvement with a mixture of rock dust and organic compost instead of the very expensive chemical fertilizer  NPK, will be in the English version of my book THE WHOLE WORLD, on which I am working presently. 

We visited an Ethiopian model farmer who had an integrated farm with everything in it: a fish pond fed by the chicken dung of the chicken pen hanging over the water, an irrigated vegetable and fruit garden, a biogas installation which provided his family with compost and light and gas for cooking; saving wood! Next to that he grew wheat and barley. His son spoke English quite well, impressive!

We also visited Dutch flower exporting farmers. Actually, you can hardly speak of farmers, they are businessmen with hectares of greenhouses. To my surprise they were more sustainable, both socially and environmentally, than I had expected. Their problem was how to compost  their green waste, of at least 3 truckloads per day.

the photo to the left is of an Indian herb farm; red basil. he exports to various european countries, also fresh mint.

I will continue later, have to go now.