What I've been up to #3: BAKING!!!

One of the overarching goals of all Peace Corps Zambia projects is on developing Income Generating Activities - ways for people in our villages to earn extra income over and above their cash crop farming. Obviously fish farming has this potential, as does the organic farming and gardening I've taken up as a side project. But what Peace Corps also want to promote are other small skills like tailoring, bicycle repair, and craftmaking, for example. And in my case, I've been playing enabler to a neighbor (Ba Elias, also my fish farming counterpart), who's starting to craft a successful baking business.

I started experimenting with baking at my site almost as soon as I got posted. Peace Corps Zambia lore is riddled with bread and cake recipes bakeable in the village, so I figured I'd give it a try. I started off baking dutch-oven style: baking in a large pot with hot coals above and below. Using this crude and barely replicable method I managed to make a few good batches of banana and pumpkin bread. Once dry season rolled around and firewood became more available, I decided to upgrade to a wood-fired earthen oven, using actual loaf pans for my bread. Since it's made entirely of mud and thus very cheap for my villagers to replicate, I figured an earthen oven would be a good way to promote baking around my village.

Building the oven by gradually layering mud around a mold made of wet sand

The oven in action

One day Ba Elias walks up to my house and says "Mike, next time you make bread can you tell me so that I can come watch you bake it". Of course I agree, and we make banana bread together soon thereafter. To my delight he brought along a pen and paper so he could write down the recipe, each of the ingredients, and how much each of them cost. He tried the end product, agreed that it was fantastically delicious, and paid it the ultimate Zambian compliment "If you eat this for lunch, I don't even think you'll need to each ubwali!" So I gave him one of the loaves of banana bread to take back to his family.

Much to my surprise, however, he does NOT take the banana bread loaf back to his family. Instead he cuts it up into dozens of tiny pieces and proceeds to run all over the village, handing out the pieces to any adult he sees and asking them how it tastes. Just like the sample stands in grocery stores, I thought! I asked him about it that evening and he says, prophetically, "Once they try it, surely they will want to buy some later." (Fortunately he did also save some for his family)

And a few weeks later, as I'm getting ready to head into town, he comes to my house with fifty thousand kwacha (about 10 dollars) he's saved up, and asks me to bring back the banana bread ingredients that he couldn't get in the village. He tells me, "I was thinking, and I believe I can sell this bread for one thousand kwatcha per slice." I've seen villagers haggling to the death over a fifty kwacha note, so I seriously doubt they'd be willing to pay one thousand for a slice of bread, but I agree to bring back the ingredients anyways. At worst, I figure, I'll just end up buying his banana bread off of him for 1000k a pop, at least until he makes his money back.

I bring the ingredients back in a few days, and Ba Elias comes to my house to collect them. I make a point to offer him free and unrestricted use of my earthen oven, even when I'm not around. "No worries," he says, "I have my own oven." While I was gone he'd managed to find a little charcoal-powered metal box oven, as well a matching baking sheet, that he bartered for completely on his own!

I helped him make the first batch using his oven, and was astonished to find a queue of customers already forming down his driveway, before the bread had even finished baking. People were indeed willing to pay 1000k for a slice; in fact they were scrambling to be first in line! That meant that every loaf he sold netted him about $5 USD. And he was hardly having to try - everywhere he went, he was converting loaves into five-dollar bills in about 30 seconds!

The finished product: delicious banana bread!

That was back in October; unfortunately after a couple of weeks, the imminent rains forced baking to take a backseat to farming. Ba Elias probably won't bake again until May, after the maize harvest is finished. But to this day I still get people telling me "Michael, you must make Ba Elias make more banana bread...we are suffering here!" And we've already got plans for entrenching the business come dry season- taking a trip to the Tanzanian border to source cheaper ingredients; figuring out which ingredients (e.g. eggs, oil) can be substituted out without sacrificing too much quality.

This story never ceases to astound me. With only a seventh-grade education in a failing school system, Ba Elias has shown the brilliance and initiative to recognize a business opportunity, save money to pursue that opportunity, do cost calculations, advertise his product in advance, correctly set a market price, and source his own equipment, all nearly entirely on his own. I've just been there to try and keep the ball rolling. I can only hope he picks up where he left off once the rains go away!

What I've been up to #2: Farming Farming

For as many generations as we can recall, the Krautmann family has been, first and foremost, a family of farmers. From mY father and grandfather to my great grandpa, all the way back to the very first fresh-off-the-boat Krautmann who ever set foot in central Missouri, little Krautmann kids have always grown up digging post holes, tending gardens, raising animals, and generally causing trouble. It's like a rite of passage into Krautmannhood. But alas, most of us from my generation have thrown off this mantle, and it pains me greatly. So under the guise of promoting food security and land conservation in my village (of course my real motivation is to assuage my guilt at having shirked my family heritage for so long), I decided to try my hand at a small conservation farming plot this upcoming rainy season.

Farming in Northern Zambia is traditionally done by hand. The farmers' tool of choice - a large hoe - is perhaps the most badass earth-moving hand tool I've ever encountered (Why they haven't yet been marketed in America is beyond me). The blade is the size of a large shovel blade and weighs 4 - 5 pounds by itself (mine is allegedly hewn from a hunk of 3/16" municipal storm drain). And then it's attached to a four-foot long baseball bat of a handle. It takes a bit of effort to get the thing moving, but the benefit is that it easily cuts through inch-thick saplings, six-foot tall clumps of grass, and whatever else you might encounter while digging. For most farmers here, a hoe and a small axe are the only farming tools they need to own.


Unfortunately Zambian farming techniques aren't quite as advanced as their weaponry. Northern Zambians traditionally employ a shifting slash-and-burn system (called "chitemene") that involves clearing and burning a plot of land, planting an indigenous crop like millet or sorghum for 4-5 years (until the soil is thoroughly depleted), and then moving to a new plot while letting the old one lie fallow. Because the native foliage gives little back to the soil, most of these fields must lie fallow for 40-50 years to regain their former fertility, So for the chitemene system to be sustainable each farmer must own a huge chunk of land (since he's only farming 10% of it at any given time), but the population of Northern Zambia has already far exceeded the level that this system can realistically support. If that weren't bad enough, farmers have now ditched their native millet and sorghum in favor of crops like maize, which have an even bigger nutrient requirement. As a result, Zambia has one of the highest deforestation rates in the world, faces huge problems with soil erosion, and has average crop yields well below what should be achievable.

Luckily a few small tweaks from the pages of Western organic farming can dramatically improve the situation:
- Intentionally rotating crops (e.g. planting maize on last year's legume field) can create soil with more balanced nutrient levels.
- Planting an improved fallow crop on unused fields can leave them good as new in as little as 3-4 years.
- Adding in natural fertilizers like animal manure, wood ash, and charcoal dust can improve soil structure and fertility over time.
- Using trees, hedges, and last year's leftover crop residues to help combat soil erosion


These are the techniques I'm trying out on my own little 25m x 25m plot next to my house (Though my aching arms and back might argue that "little" is a relative term!) My neighbors helped me collect sackfuls of ash and cow manure, which we've carefully buried in the middle of each planting ridge. We've portioned out a section for Maize, a section for peanuts, and a third portion TBD, with nice tephrosia hedges separating and surrounding each. Just planted the maize earlier this week after the first few heavy rains of the season.

The newly prepped field ready to plant

Hopefully this little experiment will go well, stay tuned for more results!

What I've been up to #1: Fish Farming

As a Rural Aquaculture Promotion volunteer fish farming is the bread and butter of my work routine. In a typical week I'll have perhaps 3 or 4 meetings with different farmers or groups of farmers in my catchment area (all the villages within approximately a 25km radius). In a typical meeting I bike out to the farmer's village and spend the day helping that group/farmer with whatever fish farming task they are currently working on.

Some farmers are interested in digging new ponds or renovating existing ones, so I help them survey their land, measure out an appropriate area, and dig the pond to meet our R.A.P. specifications. We promote hand-dug ponds measuring around 10m x 15m x 1m deep (a nice balanced size that is relatively easy to dig and still has adequate fish-holding capacity). We also try to promote ponds with thick, sloped walls for added strength, and with screened outlet pipes to keep the pond from overflowing in a rainstorm. Such a pond might take an individual farmer a few weeks to a month to dig - it's much easier when working as a group. I try to help these groups think about how to efficiently divide and manage labor so they can finish the digging quickly (my record was a group that met at 6am to dig a small 10mx10m pond, and had the whole thing finished by 10am!).

With makeshift eye black liberally applied, its time to hop in the muck and dig a new fish pond!

Other farmers want to learn or review feeding practices for fish in their existing ponds. In this case I'll go out with the farmer on foraging expeditions to collect termites, quality plant leaves, animal manure (to fertilize plankton in the water), and other choice food sources. My goal is to help that farmer establish a routine for feeding and maintaining his ponds.

Well-maintained fish ponds: thick walls, lots of fish food, and clear of weeds

Still others have had fish for several months already and are interested in harvesting and selling them. This is a good opportunity to stress business and management skills like advance advertising, good recordkeeping, and creating and following work plans. Then of course I'll help out with the actual pond harvest, since I can never avoid an opportunity to get muddy and fishy :-) Finally, I've ended up helping a lot of farmers measure out and dig long furrows to carry water to their ponds and gardens.

The many ways of harvesting fish from a pond: using a modern seine net; making a traditional Bemba reed fish trap; baling out water to catch the fish by hand; and....telekinesis?...No, the people on the bottom right are customers waiting to buy harvested fish

Because my site is so far away from any town or large marketplace, there's not a big enough market to promote fish farming as a legitimate, full-time business. My farmers can make a bit of extra side income selling amongst themselves in the village, but my main focus is on using fish farming as a means of improving family nutrition. Judging by the abundance of children in my area running around with thin hair and rounded bellies it's clear that getting sufficient protein is a challenge for many people. Thus a set of fish ponds is an easy and attractive option (whenever you want fish for dinner, just go to the fish pond and fish out a couple!) for families looking to spruce up their diet.

All in all I've got about a dozen formal groups - complete with chairman, treasurer, etc - and another couple dozen individual farmers who I meet with on a regular basis. In total they have about 200 - 250 fish ponds, and harvest about 10 kilograms of fish from each pond. Much of this was done already before I even arrived, so I can't take credit for all of it :-) There's certainly much room for improvement - work still to do for the two volunteers who follow me - but I'm happy to say that my fish farmers are off to a good start!

Rumors of my demise...

Wow, in a place where time is so incredibly relaxed, it's amazing how fast it seems to go by. My apologies - I'll do my best not to let a lapse like this happen again. I promise I have actually been up to stuff over here (like hosting my family for a couple of weeks in May!!! Thank you so much Mom & Dad for sharing your thoughts on our trip!), and now I get to make up for lost time!

I've gotten several questions recently along the lines of "Mike, so you've been in Zambia for over a year now, and we still don't know very well...what is it you actually DO for work in your village?" I'll focus on this in the next few posts, but my job at the present moment can basically be summarized as 1) teaching fish farming techniques to interested farmers, 2) promoting organic/conservation farming and gardening, and 3) inciting the creation and sale of delicious baked goods.

I've also been feeding my travel bug bit. Over 4th of July weekend I went hiking in the fabulously beautiful Mutinondo Wilderness Area, a local Northern Zambia treasure so under-the-radar that even most Northern PCVs are only barely aware of its existence. In September I finally boarded the TAZARA train that passes through my village, coming back from a trip out to Zanzibar Island. And most recently I headed down to Livingstone to see Victoria Falls and Chobe National Park. Pictures coming soon!

Sorry again for the delay, and enjoy the deluge soon to come!