Day 356: Everybody Loves a Good Drought

NUAPADA, (Orissa): Mangal Sunani was thrilled. The government was giving him a miracle cow which would greatly reduce his poverty. The cow would be impregnated with Jersey semen—brought all the way from Pune and elsewhere. So it could, over the years, make him the proud owner of several bulls and high-yield milch cows.

A little later, Sunani, a harijan of Ulva village, was even more grateful. The government had given him an acre of land free. On this, he was to grow subabul trees to provide fodder for the cattle he would soon possess. There were thirty-eight such beneficiaries in his village. And a thousand in other villages of Komna block. The government had targeted them for a major dairy development scheme aimed at reducing poverty.

The beneficiaries were ecstatic when they learned they would also be paid the minimum wage to work on the free land, growing those trees. The project, called ‘Samanwita’, evolved around 1978. By the early ’80s, it was in full swing. ‘Everybody pitched in enthusiastically,’ says Jagdish Pradhan of the Paschim Orissa Krishijeevi Sangha.

‘Five agencies got involved,’ he says. Among them were the Bharatiya Agro Industries Foundation (BAIF), a body set up by the leading corporate house, Mafatlal. With it was the Satguru Seva Trust, an NGO linked to the same group. Also in on the show was the State Bank of India. Completing the cast were the veterinary and revenue departments of the state. The theatre of action was mainly Nuapada, now a separate district in the Kalahandi region.

The authorities, like everybody else pushing the scheme, were committed to their purpose. The idea was to create a new, higher breed of cattle. Impurities, in any degree, were not welcome. How then to ensure that all the cows given to the beneficiaries received only Jersey semen and none other?

This dilemma weighed heavily on the minds of those involved. What if those cows mated with local studs? They decided to prevent the cows from crossing with local bulls. That would ensure the purity of the future race. So, according to Bishwamber Joshi, principal of the high school at Komna, local bulls were subjected to a massive castration drive. ‘The livestock inspector relentlessly castrated all bulls in Komna, Khariar and Khariar Road,’ he says. ‘Then, they resorted to artificial insemination of the cows with Jersey semen.’

Two years and Rs. 2 crores later, says Pradhan, ‘just eight crossbred calves were born in the entire region. Not one extra litre of milk was produced. And subabul trees had vanished from the area, though they were planted in thousands.’

A decade later, the results are even more stark: many villages across Komna are without a single stud bull. The castration drive has rendered the local ‘Khariar bull’ extinct—in this region at least.

There is not a single bull in this village now, Fudku Tandi tells me in Ulva. He was another ‘beneficiary’ of Samanwita. ‘Eight calves were born,’ he says, ‘very small, useless ones. Some died, the others were sold. Their yield of milk was nil.’

Shyamal Kuldeep, also a Samanwita beneficiary, says: ‘My wife and I managed to breed six calves, four of which died in a single day. Finally, none survived.’

‘When we told them of the problems,’ says Chamru Niyal, ‘they said they would give more injections and some day the calves would come.’ The initial eagerness of the villagers arose from the wage employment the project provided. ‘Whoever gives us work that feeds us is god,’ says Fudku Tandi.

As Tandi recalls, ‘A government officer came from Bhubaneswar. He said we would get employment, wheat and rice if we planted subabul on the land given to us. At first the subabul grew splendidly. Then they told us to cut the trees down for use as fodder. We did this. But they did not grow again.’ (Experts like Pradhan say this tree is most unsuited to the soil of the region.)

What upsets the villagers most is that the employment is over. ‘The land is back with the government,’ says Mangal Sunani. ‘A revenue official came and told us to vacate it. So the thirtyeight acres now lie fallow.’ This happened in the villages of other ‘beneficiaries’ too.

The disaster has been enormous. Throughout Kalahandi region, people traditionally keep large numbers of cattle. The cattle population here is among the highest in Orissa and India. During lean years, peasants compensate the loss from agriculture by selling two or three head of cattle. This is about the only insurance they have. Consequently, the decline of the species has battered their fragile economy.

The mass castrations destroyed the Khariar bull. In 1980—before the scheme had fully blossomed —the Kalahandi District Gazetteer had noted the calibre of this species. It recorded that ‘if properly maintained, a cow of this breed is capable of yielding four to five litres of milk per day. This breed was selected for research by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR).’

Locals wonder why the Khariar bull has vanished. The fact that the cows and bullocks these days are very small also puzzles them. The number of cattle is not increasing the way it used to. Quality has suffered badly.

‘I have five cows and I buy milk daily from the market,’ laughs Bishwamber Joshi. ‘And I doubt if there is a single decent ox in the whole block now. Several one-time surplus milk producers suffered enormously and are now milk buyers.’ In 1977-78, pure ghee was actually cheaper than Dalda in Komna and Khariar. Ghee cost just Rs. 7 a kg against Rs. 9 a kg for Dalda.

‘The Khariar bull is almost extinct,’ confirms Dr Maheshwar Satpathy, the veterinary surgeon at Khariar Road. Dr Satpathy says specimens of the old type may still exist outside Kalahandi. But there is ‘definitely a decline in the quality of Khariar cattle as a whole’. For years prior to this, cattlebreeders from other parts of Orissa used to come here to buy Khariar bulls. They were popular as studs and helped improve breeds elsewhere. Now they do not exist.

The Paschim Orissa Krishijeevi Sangha has tried to assess the damage. Their estimate: in Komna block alone, the loss of cattle during the last ten or twelve years has been to the tune of Rs. 30 lakhs a year. Bishwamber Joshi believes the decline of cattle wealth has spurred further migrations from the region.

~~Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India’s Poorest Districts -by- P. Sainath

Day 346: One-Straw Revolutionary

The person most responsible for articulating the principles of the organic farming movement was Sir Albert Howard (1873–1947). Throughout his life Howard published many books and articles. His best known are 'An Agricultural Testament' (1940) and 'The Soil and Health' (1947). They were written with both general readers and scientists in mind. Howard grew up in the English countryside and was trained as a mycologist at Cambridge University, in London. In 1905, after spending a few years working in the West Indies and a few years teaching agricultural science in England, he traveled to India where he would spend the next twenty-six years of his life directing agricultural research.

Howard’s first appointment was to The Research Institute at Pusa, near Calcutta. Since he was not familiar with the farming in India, he spent most of his time there learning from local farmers, whom he referred to as his “professors.” He watched them produce healthy crops of wheat, chickpeas, and tobacco without using chemical fertilizer or insecticides. Howard also noticed that the draft oxen used at the institute did not suffer from the contagious diseases that plagued animals on the neighboring farms even though they were in such close proximity that they rubbed noses across the fence lines.

“From these observations on plants and animals, Sir Albert was led to the conclusion that the secret of health and disease lay in the soil. The soil must be fertile to produce healthy plants and fertility meant a high percentage of humus. Humus was the key to the whole problem, not only of yields but of health and disease. From healthy plants grown on humus-rich soil, animals would feed and be healthy.” To replace the humus removed from the soil, Howard turned to composting, crediting the Chinese with the idea. In a memorial article for her husband, Louise Howard wrote, “On this crucial question of returning wastes to the soil, he always acknowledged his debt to the great American missionary, F. H. King, whose famous book, The Farmers of Forty Centuries . . . was to him a kind of bible.”

The Chinese system of agriculture described by King and Howard became the model for the worldwide organic farming movement as popularized by J. I. Rodale through Organic Gardening magazine and countless other Rodale publications. Two linked features characterize this system—plowing, and lots of work. The decomposition of organic matter in the soil occurs through the process of oxidation, similar to digestion in the human body. The rate of this slow, steady burn is regulated by the amount of oxygen in the soil. In a natural soil the rate of decomposition matches the amount of plant material the soil produces along with the droppings and decaying bodies of animals and microorganisms. When the soil is plowed, the amount of oxygen is increased so the rate of decomposition increases. To maintain the fertility of the soil, new organic matter must be added on a regular basis. That’s where the work comes in, and the need for all that compost.

When human beings first learned to plow, they gained access to the vast reserve of solar energy that had been stored in the organic matter of the soil, but access to this energy came at a very high price in the form of labor, erosion, and other environmental consequences. Albert Howard thought the trade-off was worth it because it allowed civilization to flourish. “[Through cultivation of the soil] man has laid his hand on the great Wheel and for a moment has stopped or deflected its turning. To put it another way, he has for his own use withdrawn from the soil the products of its fertility. That man is entitled to put his hand on the Wheel has never been doubted, except by such sects . . . who argued themselves into a state of declaring it a sin to wound the earth with spades or tools.” He believed that it was perfectly all right to plow the soil, entirely remaking nature in the process, as long as people also put in the hard work to maintain the soil’s fertility. “All the great agricultural systems which have survived have made it their business never to deplete the earth of its fertility without at the same time beginning the process of restoration. This becomes a veritable preoccupation.”

Mr. Fukuoka and the Indigenous people of the world did not think it was a good idea, morally or otherwise, “to withdraw for his own use the products of the soil’s fertility” by plowing. They were content to coexist with the land in a more gentle way. They also did not want to make replacing the earth’s fertility “a veritable preoccupation.”
This dichotomy between nurturing the land for the benefit of all species and using it strictly for the advancement of human civilization is summed up in an illuminating paragraph from Howard’s Soil and Health:

What is agriculture? It is undoubtedly the oldest of the great arts; its beginnings are lost in the mists of man’s earliest days. Moreover, it is the foundation of settled life and therefore of all true civilization, for until man had learnt to add the cultivation of plants to his knowledge of hunting and fishing, he could not emerge from his savage existence. This is no mere surmise: observation of surviving primitive tribes, still in the hunting and fishing stage . . . show them unable to progress because they have not mastered and developed the principle of cultivation of the soil.

In this passage, Howard reveals the smug attitudes of his culture. He maintains that until plowed-field agriculture came along, the basis of all true civilization, people led a “savage existence.” In a later passage he referred to the way Indigenous people obtained their food as “nothing more than a harvesting process.”9 Without plowing the soil these primitive people were “unable to progress,” and the only way they could improve themselves was to change their ways to be like his. Of course that would entail remaking their entire way of life and violating their own ethics. Perhaps these people had no interest in joining the “march to progress,” did not believe that dominating nature was a good idea, and felt it was not “man’s destiny” to do so. The irony is that even though things have not gone at all well for human society or the environment over the past ten thousand years, the air of superiority persists.

In 1931 Howard retired from government service and returned to England. An Agricultural Testament was published in 1943. His ideas were immediately attacked by the agricultural establishment, which viewed them as exaggerations and oversimplifications. He was marginalized as an extremist largely because of his lack of scientific proof and his hard-line stand against the use of synthetic chemicals of any kind. Where were the comparison plots? Where was the data? Science demanded that he use their empirical criteria while Howard’s understanding was based largely on whole systems analysis, intuition, and a lifetime of experience.

~~One-Straw Revolutionary: The Philosophy And Work Of Masanobu Fukuoka -by- Larry Korn

Day 198: A History of World Agriculture

Many other improvements contributed to this tremendous development of wet rice growing. Transplanting rice, previously sown and raised in small nurseries, shortened the time needed in the rice fields and made it easier to increase the number of annual harvests. The use of animal and later motorized traction to plow, mix, and level the soil before transplanting made it possible to save precious time. Lastly, selection of non-photoperiodic varieties (not as sensitive to the relative length of day and night and thus cultivable in all seasons in various parts of the world) and of varieties with a short reproductive cycle made it possible to achieve more than three rice harvests per year.

From natural lakes to huge installations in valleys and deltas, a whole range of hydraulic systems were created, combining in diverse ways rice paddies, terraces, dikes, locks, diversion dams, reservoir dams, irrigation canals, and draining canals. The architecture of the large hydraulic works of the rice-growing regions was different from that found in the large valleys of the arid regions. But the works were of comparable scale and gave rise to comparable forms of social and political organization.


Notice, however, that the great aquatic rice-growing civilizations of monsoon Asia began to develop more than two millennia after the hydro-agricultural civilizations of the Indus, Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile Valleys. In China, the very first hydraulic city-states appeared in the second millennium B.C.E., in the middle Yellow River region situated close to the Chinese center of origin. These cities were united into the first embryonic empire under the Shang Dynasty (seventeenth to eleventh centuries B.C.E.). However, historians speak of a true wet rice-growing civilization beginning only in the following period (eleventh to third centuries B.C.E.), during which ten hydraulic and wall-building kingdoms were formed and fought one another until the most powerful among them, the Qing (from 249 to 246 B.C.E.) imposed its supremacy and administration to all of China, from the Great Wall to Canton.

In India, while rice was cultivated in the east since at least 2000 B.C.E., the first hydro-agricultural civilization of the middle Ganges Valley did not appear until around 800 B.C.E. The emergence of this civilization followed the Aryan penetration which had begun several centuries earlier, around 1500 B.C.E. Coming from the north of Iran where their herds exploited the steppes, which were relatively unproductive and not very propitious for cultivation, tribes of Aryan herders had previously invaded the Indus Valley where they had, it is thought, precipitated the collapse of the preexisting large hydraulic cities (Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa). Then, traversing the Punjab, they colonized in successive waves the quasi-intact great forests of the Ganges Valley and north-west India, still occupied by communities of hunters and fishers who occasionally practiced a temporary form of slash-and-burn agriculture. As a result, the immigrants were compelled to abandon pastoral nomadism, become settled, adopt the cultural complex of the humid tropical forest (including Oryza sativa) and, over several centuries, extend their clearings before reaching the end of the arboreal ecosystem. After that, the first post-forest agrarian systems and first hydraulic city-kingdoms of the Ganges Valley were formed. In the sixth century B.C.E., one of these kingdoms (the Moghada) began to subjugate and unify its neighbors forming, in the fourth century B.C.E., an empire that occupied at first the whole Ganges Valley and which, two centuries later, extended from the Indus to the Gulf of Bengal, and from the Himalayas three-quarters of the way down the Deccan peninsula.

During the first millennium C.E., a whole series of other hydraulic and rice-growing city-states were formed, either autonomously or by expansion, in the Indochinese peninsula, Japan, Indonesia, and even Madagascar. If China exerted a technological and commercial influence over most of these civilizations, India often provided them with certain cultural elements (writing, religion, art, government, and administration).

~~A History of World Agriculture -by- Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart

Day 87 : Book Excerpt : Ideas: A History

Much more controversial, however, are the reasons for why agriculture developed, why it developed then, and why it developed where it did. This is clearly of major importance in understanding mankind’s mental development. It is also an even more interesting question than it looks when you consider the fact that the hunter-gathering mode is actually quite an efficient way of leading one’s life. Ethnographic evidence among hunter-gatherer tribes still in existence shows that they typically need to ‘work’ only three or four or five hours a day in order to provide for themselves and their kin. Skeletal remains of Stone Age farmers reveal more signs of malnutrition, infectious diseases and dental decay than those of their hunter-gatherer predecessors. Why, therefore, would one change such a set of circumstances for something different where one has to work far harder? In addition, reliance on grain imposed a far more monotonous diet on early humans than they had been used to in the time of hunting and gathering. In any case, when people first domesticated crops, these remained a minor part of the diet for centuries, possibly more than a thousand years. Again, why the change?

One theory is that the switch to agriculture was made for ritualistic or social reasons, because the new foods were rare luxuries, which gradually spread, the way designer goods do in our own day. Lentils, for example, grow just two per wild plant and would hardly have staunched the hunger of a Stone Age family. Yet lentils are among the first crops of the Near East. Some palaeontologists feel beer was the most important end-product of these grains, the importance of alcohol in a ritual feast being obvious.

But the most basic of the economic arguments stems from the fact that, as has already been mentioned, some time between 14,000 and 10,000 BP, the world suffered a major climatic change. This was partly a result of the end of the Ice Age which had the twin effects of raising sea levels and, in the warmer climate, encouraging the spread of forests. These two factors ensured that the amount of open land shrank quite dramatically, ‘segmenting formerly open ranges into smaller units and arranging the niches for different species by altitude and type of vegetation . . . Sedentism and the reduction of open range encouraged territoriality. People began to protect and propagate local herds, a pre-domestication practice that can be referred to as food resource management.’ A further aspect of this set of changes was that the climate became increasingly arid, and the seasons became more pronounced, a circumstance which encouraged the spread of wild cereal grasses and the movement of peoples from one environment to the next, in search of both plants and animal flesh. There was more climatic variety in areas which had mountains, coastal plains, higher plains and rivers. This accounts for the importance of the fertile crescent. Grasses were naturally prevalent in this Near Eastern region (wild stands of emmer and einkorn wheat, and barley, exist there to this day). But it is not difficult to work out what happened. ‘The harvested batch of seeds would be selected in favour of non-shattering and uniform maturation. As soon as humans began to sow the seeds they had harvested, they automatically – even if unintentionally – initiated a process of selection in favour of the non-shattering genotype.’

Mark Nathan Cohen is the most prominent advocate of the theory that there was a population crisis in pre-history and that it was this which precipitated the evolution of agriculture. Among the evidence he marshals to support his argument is the fact that agriculture is not easier than hunter-gathering, that there is a ‘global coincidence’ in the simultaneous extinction of mega-fauna, the big mammals which provided so much protein for early humans, a further coincidence that domestication emerged at the end of the Pleistocene Age, when the world warmed up and people became much more mobile, and that the cultivation of wild species, before agriculture proper, encouraged the birth of more children. It is well known, for instance, that nomads and hunter-gatherers control the number of children by not weaning them for two years. This limits the size of a group that is continually on the move. After the development of sedentism, however, this was no longer necessary, and resulted, says Cohen, in a major population explosion. Cohen also claims that evidence for a population crisis in antiquity can be inferred from the number of new zones exploited for food, the change in diet, from plants which need less preparation to those which need more, the change in diet from larger animals to smaller (because larger ones were extinct), the increasing proportion of remains of people who are malnourished, the specialisation of artefacts which had evolved to deal with rarer and rarer animals and plants, the increased use of fire, for cooking otherwise inedible foodstuffs, the increased use of aquatic resources, the fact that many plants, though available as food in deep antiquity, were not harvested until around 12,000 BP, that grass (cereals) is a low priority in food terms, and so on and so on, all of which Cohen contends is corroborated by archaeological excavation. For him, therefore, the agricultural revolution was not, in and of itself, a liberation for early humans. It was instead a holding action to cope with the crisis of overpopulation. Far from being an inferior form of life, the hunter-gatherers had been so successful they had filled up the world, insofar as their lifestyle allowed, and there was no place to turn.

It is another attractively simple hypothesis but there are problems with it. One of the strongest criticisms comes from Les Groube, who is the advocate of a rival theory. According to Groube, who is based in France, it is simply not true that the world of deep antiquity was in a population crisis, or certainly not a crisis of overpopulation. His argument is the opposite, that the relatively late colonisation of Europe and the Americas argues for a fairly thinly populated Earth. For Groube, as man moved out of Africa into colder environments, there would have been fewer problems with disease, simply because, from a microbial point of view, the colder regions were safer, healthier. For many thousands of years, therefore, early man would have suffered fewer diseases in such places as Europe and Siberia, as compared with Africa. But then, around 20,000 years ago, an important coincidence took place. The world started to warm up, and man reached the end of the Old World – meaning that, in effect, the known world was ‘full’ of people. There was still plenty of food but, as the world warmed up, many of the parasites on man were also able to move out of Africa. In short, what had previously been tropical diseases became temperate diseases as well. The diseases Groube mentions include malaria, schistosomiasis and hookworm, ‘a terrible trinity’. A second coincidence also occurred. This was the hunting to extinction of the mega-fauna, which were all mammals, and therefore to a large extent biologically similar to man. All of a sudden (sudden in evolutionary terms), there were far fewer mammals for the microbial predators to feast on – and they were driven to man.

~~Ideas: A History -by- Peter Watson