Droughts and opportunities

A usually full lake has nearly dried out in this photo from West Aftrica

I read an NPR story this morning that gave me cause for concern. The whole story is here, and basically it is about the current drought in West Africa. Malek Triki, the regional spokesman for the UN World Food Program, says "Because of failure of crops, because of erratic and late rainfall and the protracted drought, the whole region has been suffering a food crisis." The article goes on to cover the difficulties and challenges with providing aid to the people affected, but what it glosses over, and what I'll focus on instead, is the root cause of this problem, and a solution to it.

In farmland that has been worked extensively, has borne many applications of chemicals, and been plowed and tilled many times over, the natural structure of the soil, held up by the microbiological communities therein, collapses. Soil that once had tunnels, caverns, and microbe-sized lakes, now has nothing but little bits of rock squished up against each other with minute patches of organic matter in between. The natural water storing ability of the soil has been stripped, so what water is applied to the surface is mostly lost to runoff or evaporation. A soil with a healthy microbial community can require as much as 70% less water than land without the help of the microbes.

To demonstrate this point, and perhaps to introduce a technique that could turn this situation in West Africa on its head, I'd like to point out an example I recently stumbled on from Mexico. Doug Weatherbee, of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, is a Soil Foodweb Advisor for Soil Foodweb Inc (founded and run by Dr Elaine Ingham, my personal heroine).

Last summer, Mr Weatherbee conducted a trial on some corn grown locally, comparing a biologically correct method with a traditional campesino grower. For Mexico, 2009 was a hard year, which saw the worst drought in over 60 years. Many dryland crops failed, and most only produced meager results. Mr Weatherbee and his associates applied a highly fungal compost tea (made with microscopic precision) three times over the season, and provided minimal foods such as humic acids, and some fish hydrolosate made from fish sourced from a local lake. The results speak for themselves.

The corn on the left is from the non-biologic area, the corn on the right had the help of some microbes.

Astounding eh? The control corn barely looks edible, while the biologically produced corn would be considered an excellent corn specimen even in a normal (non-drought) year. So clearly, the quality of the biological corn is superior, but what about the yields?

Corn on left = 735 sq ft of biological, Corn on right = 735 sq ft of standard practice

The corn grown in soil with a healthy supportive biological community yielded nearly five times more food than the control plot, weighing in at 527 lbs biological versus 114 lbs control. This difference is monumental. If this is the case in a drought year, what could be produced in a good year? The answer: even more.

If we can extrapolate this kind of work to the places that really need it, like Niger and other drought-prone West African countries, we won't need to hear about how the UN is so pressed for food aid that they have had to limit their handouts to only families with children under two years old. We can instead hear about all the amazing things that the UN can do to improve education, health, disease prevention, and social well-being with all the money and resources they saved from not having to provide millions of starving people with barely enough food to live.

It grits my rivets to see all these problems in the world which can be traced to an improper management of natural resources. Even worse is when the response to the problem is only a poultice for the symptom, and not a solution for the systemic issue producing the symptom. Now, by no means am I suggesting that the UN not provide food aid to those in West Africa who are starving. Please, UN, do feed these hungry families. Could we please also try to factor in some energy to get the managers of land to also recognize that there are sustainable solutions out there? Even better, can we get those growers and farmers to try out some of these techniques and see what happens? Please? Lets address this issue at the root, and give these people of West Africa the information they need to be able to lift themselves up out of the situation that we have participated in creating for them.