Field Visits Part 2: The Walk

   So we are still in the midst of doing our field visits, and up to this point we have met with over 40 farmers who have more than 60 fields of coffee in Oku and the neighboring village Mbessa. I’m expecting that we may be able to meet with about 20-25 more farmers in the next week to round out tho ones we are going to work with here in 2012. This week I actually had to put a little delay in our schedule of field visits in order to return to where I used to work in the West Region to sort out an issue with my immigration status (here’s to not getting deported!!!), but as of Monday of next week we will be right back to it. In the meanwhile, I’m also taking the opportunity of being out of Oku to keep up some social connections here in the West, meet with other players in the world of Cameroon coffee, and do a little research into the availability of seeds for good cover crop plants.

   Last post I described our interview process, this time I want to tell you about the second part of the farm visit, which is the field walk. Following the interview we know how many fields each farmer has either under coffee or other crops and which of those fields they want to try to have certified. For our field walks we only focus on that last category: coffee fields to be certified. The rest we obtain information for, but do not need to visit individually. We leave the house with our trusty tape measure (which we are beating the hell out of) and find the first edge of the nearest field to be certified. There are always three people (e.g. me, Cassman or Gilbert, and the farmer), though a fourth makes the process easier so if there is a child handy we make good use of them. One person will hold the measure in place, the next guy pulls the tape along the border, the owner of the field will direct so that we don’t’ miss the sometimes impossible to detect borders between fields, and I sketch out a little map of the area.

   What we want to remember from these visits is the orientation of the field and all of its borders, the orientation of the slope, the crops being grown adjacent to the coffee, the intercrops, and any out of the ordinary features we can spot (one guy has a CamWater treatment plant in the middle of his field, I’m curious how our certifiers are going to find that). Pretty simple, but I’ll tell you that the physical nature of the work is a little daunting. The thing about the borders of fields is that they are often the least visited place in a field, and usually aren’t meant to be walked along. So whether you’re ducking through brambles, wading through a marsh, or stepping precariously along a ledge you always want to be on your toes. I trip and fall about 1.6 times per field, and I am without exception going to be the dirtiest person when we leave the field (bear in mind, that has been true in almost every job I’ve had, even lab work). After we get this information, I bring it back to my computer and try to include it on our big map of Oku/Mbessa which shows the locations of all our partner’s farms around the village and is starting to get much fuller than I expected it to be.

   One important aspect of these visits that really only occurred to me after about 2-weeks of doing them is that this is our first chance to show our farmer-partners how serious (NB serious is a word used a lot here, to be called serious is a great compliment, telling someone they are not serious should not be taken lightly) this program and us field officers are. By being very thorough during our interviews and field visits, I am hoping that we are demonstrating the kind of organization and professionalism that we are going to need everyone involved in this project to display in order for it to be successful. Much of the time I feel like I am being the bad cop in our team, trying to keep expectations realistic and discourage anyone from entering into the program lightly, a role I’m pretty comfortable with. This is a topic I’ll certainly get back to in the future and would love to get feedback on, but for now I’ll finish by asking this, is it right to get people interested in a program like this by presenting them with the simplest possible interpretation of it?

(In this case, that would be ‘if you don’t use any agrochemicals you can be certified as organic’)