Are you guys gonna start acting like hipsters soon?

I lived in Ithaca, NY for about two-years between 2009 and 2011. Ithaca is one of those towns where hippies go to retire, finding tree stumps carved into ‘gnome homes’ is common, and a conversation along the lines of :

‘Drinking Kambucha has changed my life.’

 I know, right, I just bought some yesterday and I feel great.’

‘Oh, you buy yours? I make mine from scratch from a mother culture that comes from the highlands of Nepal, so...you know...’

is likely to be overheard in the local grocery cooperative (which I was a member of, by the by).

I’ve been at this organic work here in Cameroon for about 18-months now, and I’m starting to wonder if the people I work with will ever adopt that somewhat separatist/elitist/hipsterish/environmentalist attitude that is so tightly connected to the organic movement in the US. Frankly, it would make my work a lot easier if the farmers who took on the organic title took the organic worldview along with it. As it stands, I can give a list of rules and make sure that they are being followed, but there is still something intangible missing from the culture of our group of farmers.

I’m sure that my own approach to organic production isn’t really helping nurture this sub-culture. My motivation in this endeavor leans more towards the economic (you can get more cash per kilogram of coffee if it is certified) than the environmental. Obviously, I don’t ditch the later but as an illustration of how I straddle that line, last month in our training meetings I discussed weed control, devoting significant time to describing the health hazards associated with herbicide use. At the same time, I couldn’t resist devoting additional time to discussing the safest and most responsible use of chemicals (herbicides included) which did lead a few people to wonder where exactly I stood on herbicide use. (In my defense I made sure to say the exact phrase, ‘Organic growers are never allowed to use chemical herbicides of any kind, ever, without exception’ at least four times in each of those meetings, so I felt like I was being pretty clear).

A different organizer would have probably run those meetings a different way, perhaps ignoring the potential use of chemicals all together and using the training time to try to galvanize farmers’ minds against the idea of herbicides. As I write that sentence, I certainly see merit in that approach, maybe more than I did a month ago, but I just wouldn’t be able to run it that way. The galvanizing approach would probably lead to that organic sub-culture much more quickly than my own hedging method. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to think about how to punch up the status and raison d’etre of organic production, at least in the minds of Oku practitioners.

We are allowed to use some chemicals...just don’t make a big deal out of it

Two posts ago, I was describing the problem we have with fungi in our coffee nurseries. We pretty much followed the path I described, though there was a little more delay in getting the fungicide spray than I expected. The garlic was crushed and applied the same next day and we figured out after about two days that we could use a product called Nordox (Copper Oxide) to try to solve our problem.

Here’s a rundown of how that process works:

Step 1: Check your own expertise for options of controlling fungi organically. For me, when there is an actual problem, this kind of starts and stops with stuff like garlic or papaya leaves. To be fair, a well run healthy farm should be protected from fungi in a more preventative way (good sun/shade balance, healthy/well-fed crops that can protect themselves, maybe a compost tea spray, etc.) so when a fungus is obviously out of control as was the case in our nursery, botanical methods kind of fall short. Philip and I agreed quickly to reach for something stronger.

Step 2: Check the National Organic Program (the USDA’s list of practices for organic production) for what synthetics are allowed. And I quote:

205.601   Synthetic substances allowed for use in organic crop production.

In accordance with restrictions specified in this section, the following synthetic substances may be used in organic crop production: Provided, That, use of such substances do not contribute to contamination of crops, soil, or water. Substances allowed by this section, except disinfectants and sanitizers in paragraph (a) and those substances in paragraphs (c), (j), (k), and (l) of this section, may only be used when the provisions set forth in §205.206(a) through (d) prove insufficient to prevent or control the target pest.

(i) As plant disease control.

(1) Aqueous potassium silicate (CAS #–1312–76–1)—the silica, used in the manufacture of potassium silicate, must be sourced from naturally occurring sand.

(2) Coppers, fixed—copper hydroxide, copper oxide, copper oxychloride, includes products exempted from EPA tolerance, Provided, That, copper-based materials must be used in a manner that minimizes accumulation in the soil and shall not be used as herbicides.

(3) Copper sulfate—Substance must be used in a manner that minimizes accumulation of copper in the soil.

(4) Hydrated lime.

(5) Hydrogen peroxide.

(6) Lime sulfur.

(7) Oils, horticultural, narrow range oils as dormant, suffocating, and summer oils.

(8) Peracetic acid—for use to control fire blight bacteria.

(9) Potassium bicarbonate.

(10) Elemental sulfur.

(11) Streptomycin, for fire blight control in apples and pears only.

(12) Tetracycline, for fire blight control only and for use only until October 21, 2012.

Quite a list really. For the keen reader, section 205.206 is basically what I described in Step 1 concerning the mostly preventative best practices. In this case, myself and Philip are willing to attest that they were insufficient.

Step 3: Figure out what you can get in Cameroon. Procuring inputs tends to be a lot trickier here than in the US. I don’t get a dozen catalogs sent to me each month like I did when I was working in a greenhouse. For this, I sent an email to our friendly certifier asking if he could point us in the right direction. He did, giving me the trade names of available hydrogen peroxide and copper oxide.

Step 4: Apply, following all the same safety precautions a person working on a conventional farm would. As you can see in the picture to the left, we did. Now we wait the time prescribed by the label to apply again (2 weeks).

I’m not happy that we had our nursery attacked by fungus (I think it is botrytis, but who knows), obviously. At the same time, I am glad we got the chance to go through this exercise. In the future, the decision to use copper oxide fungicides will be more streamlined. As an Internal Control System, we can put copper oxide on our list of allowable synthetic inputs and permission to use it can come from me or Philip after we assess the situation. Already, some farmers have asked us to use copper oxide to combat coffee berry disease and we’ve denied them because it has never been shown to be very effective and needs to be applied at a volume and frequency we’re not comfortable with. To me, this means that the system works.

People Walk on the Left

I don’t know how it took me over two years to notice this but when two people meet on a narrow path, they move to the left here. Again, how did I miss this for two years? It’s not as though narrow footpaths haven’t been a constant feature of my life for the past two years or that I’m not sensitive to weird social interactions (I am). Whatever the reason, it was just about two weeks ago that I was doing the funny, ‘which way are you gonna go’ dance that happens when you meet someone on a narrow path when I realized this person really wanted to pass on the left side. It happened again just a few moments later with another person coming down the path and from that point I’ve noticed that it is pretty much universal.

 

Cars drive on the right. Apparently this isn’t true for the whole continent, if you go south of Zimbabwe/Botswana the cars move on the left (I wonder who will win that regulatory battle if it ever comes to a head, I’d say South Africa if the weight of most of the rest of the world wasn’t on the side of RIGHT). Still in village cars meeting each other on the road is still a pretty rare occasion. Many people, children especially, probably don’t see it very often, so the driving convention isn’t terribly prevalent. When I spoke to my boss Philip about this, he laughed. He lives in Bamenda, the city, and there he says people usually go to the right, but in his home village of Ndop (between Oku and Bamenda) he was used to passing on the left when he was younger. So it’s not just Oku.

I’m not going to try to put too fine a point on this or use it as an analogy for other kinds of conventions and technology moving from cities to villages (though I could, and by mentioning them at all I kind of am...). I just thought it was worth mentioning.

Ahhhhhh, crap...

Kind of a bummer today, but hope is not lost and we’re going to get a chance to test the responsiveness of our Internal Control System. Philip came up yesterday afternoon and was around for most of the day today. The primary reason he came up was to bring us some cash that we can be using for advances, which is very timely since school is opening next week and school fees and other related expenses are on everyone’s mind.

This morning, we visited one of our farmer-partners in the village of Lui. This is one of the farmers nursing some coffee seeds we brought up this past spring; about a kilogram or what should turn into about 3,000 seedlings. Well apparently, I haven’t been paying as close attention to the nursery as I ought to have been because when Philip looked at the seedlings the first thing he saw was a fungus disease that I completely missed, and it’s pretty nasty, so I’m embarrassed to say that.

An ant's eye view of some coffee that needs help.

I’m no pathologist, so I can’t say for sure which disease this is, but it comes out as soaked black spots on the first leaves (cotyledons) and also affects the stem (or hypocotyl) eventually causing the growing point to die, effectively killing the plant. Philip has seen this in his own nursery and immediately recommended a few fungicides. Here’s where the Internal Control stuff comes in. By US law, there are actually a pretty broad range of copper based fungicides that are allowed for application. The idea is that you can apply these fungicides in a limited fashion when there is a demonstrable need and you can avoid soil contamination. I’d say we have the demonstrable need and if we follow the best practices for application we can avoid soil contamination, particularly since these seedlings are being grown in a raised bed.

Next step, stop gap application of a botanical fungicide. We’ll go with garlic cause I have some in my house now and I wouldn’t mind mashing some up to add to my mashed potatoes later tonight anyway. Step two, find all the available fungicides available in the market and look up their chemical formulas to see if they are allowed by the US Organic law. Step three, send an email to our Licensed Certifier to ask for permission to use whatever fungicides we think are suitable. Go team!

On a personal note, while I am embarrassed that I missed this one, it fits into the general pattern of my professional growing life. I’m pretty much blind to anything unless I’ve had it pointed out to me. First time my poinsettias died from Phytophthora I was just befuddled and the first time my geraniums were showing Iron/Manganese toxicity I was pretty sure I just needed to water them more, but give me the chance to kill a few hundred/thousand plants and I’m gonna learn something. So next time coffee is being nursed in my backyard this damping off disease will not go unnoticed. Can’t say that’s much consolation to the poor seedlings that are keeling over now, but that’s pretty much why I went into biology and not zoology a decade ago.

DIY

I spend a lot of time wrestling with the balance between doing it myself and encouraging someone else to do it. Record keeping is a good example: whenever I visit a certified farmer I make it a habit to check their records to be sure they are keeping up and add any details they might have missed. The quality of records kept range from detailed daily entries to nothing for several months. When I come upon one of these blank books I have to make some choices about how to handle it. Originally (and this is still written in some of our internal documents, to my chagrin) me or another field officer were supposed to be available to help complete records for farmers that don’t read/write, but we pretty quickly realized that this was way too much to offer in terms of time, so it has been cut back to an offer to help fill the book in the time before or after monthly meetings. I’m pretty happy with that balance. Most farmers are able to fill the book themselves, or they have someone in their family to help write their work down, and for those who have neither they can see me or another person with Mocha Joes at least once a month.

I’ve written about compost before and how I want to be using compost tea as a strategy for controlling the coffee berry disease that is so destructive here, so you know that’s on my mind a lot, and recently I’ve been somewhat fixated on the idea of using soap as an insecticide. There are a few farmers who have compost piles now but the management is pretty shoddy and I want to get some good quality compost, so this past week I bit the bullet and went ahead and made myself a compost pile behind my house (previously I would give my scraps to a farmer who was keeping a decent pile). It’s a pretty makeshift affair, chicken wire for structure and bamboo for a base. The quantity of compostable material I produce isn’t large enough for me to make a free standing pile in a reasonable amount of time, so that’s why I went with the chicken wire cylinder. To increase the amount of material I talked to my neighbors about adding their own kitchen waste in exchange for some of the output. Their enthusiasm was surprising and gratifying and it already seems like the system will need to be expanded. So here’s hoping that in about 3-4 months I’ll have some good compost to make some nice tea.

Which soap is homemade? Hint: It doesn't look like soap.

So the compost is going pretty well. Finding insecticidal soap has been another issue. The stumbling block here is the vagueness of the US Organic standard and the difficulty in finding the ingredients in the locally available soaps. Soap is basically a fat or oil reacted with some kind of hydroxide (sodium hydroxide aka caustic lye is most common because it’s cheap); not too hard to make and it is not uncommon to find people who make their own soap in villages in Cameroon. I even have some instructions in a catalog of income generating activities some Peace Corps friends put together. After about two weeks of asking around it became apparent that there is no one in Oku currently making soap (though one lady tells me she plans to start again soon), so I figured I’d give it a go. Well there are two points the Peace Corps instructions I have don’t mention (and as a guy who has worked in science labs, I shouldn’t need to be told these things, but I totally bricked and never saw this coming). First, when caustic soda reacts with oil and water, it damn near explodes. Not like, kaboom explode, but lots of frothing and bubbling and very hot and caustic foam being sputtered everywhere and some pretty noxious gasses coming off at the same time. So that was a surprise for me and the friend I enlisted to help me. The other surprise was that you can NOT do this in an aluminum pot. Granted the instructions did say to use a bucket, but it didn’t say NOT to use a pot, so we had an extra clean pot and just opted to use it. Again, caustic soda is really reactive and will oxidize aluminum (apparently it is used in aluminum etching, who knew?), so our mixture never quite stopped bubbling all through the time we were making it and at the end it had a gnarly green color and gave us much less total soap than we expected. On the plus side the pot was really clean afterward. Lessons learned? When the instructions say use a bucket, use a bucket.