It’s always critical to look at the livelihoods of the people in situations where animal habitats are stressed. Although at least half the population in this region lives in villages with fewer than five hundred people, the land is controlled by a board that determines where people can expand and plant crops. Dr. Stronza offered data from a recent national agricultural survey showing that over three years (2003–2006), the area of land planted for traditional agriculture increased by 46 percent, alongside a significant increase in the number of subsistence farmers. There is some floodplain farming that takes advantage of the Okavango River and its seasonal flooding, but many of the farmers even quite close to the delta are at a higher elevation. Their farms are rain fed, and they have no way of transporting the water from the river to their fields. The soils here are sandy and low in nutrients, and many crop fields are exhausted and produce low harvests. When rainfall is low, yields fall even further. Farmers apply for permission to plant new crops on better soils, and the land board keeps awarding these plots not only near existing fields but also closer and closer to traditional elephant pathways. Naturally, this incursion results in trouble when elephants find themselves no longer walking through sparse bushland but near fields full of sorghum or maize.
Botswana farmers are permitted to shoot elephants that are menacing their animals or stealing or damaging crops, and the government pays a small amount of compensation when there is crop raiding. However, the payments lag well behind what the government pays cattle ranchers when wild animals kill a cow, for example. This discrepancy leads to even more conflict between ranchers and farmers, as well as the bitter description that some local farmers have for elephants: “the government’s cattle.” They believe the government’s policies protect the elephants at the expense of its own poor, hungry citizens.
Many different human, animal, and environmental factors are colliding here. And community attitudes about the elephants are not uniform, Dr. Songhurst has observed. A local man helping the scientists told us that many local people hate the elephants and are in favor of culling these herds to a less threatening size, as the government has considered. But at least one local tribal group believes that elephants embody the souls of its ancestors. They not only honor elephants but also would never kill them or eat their meat. Other tribes have no such taboos and will dry elephant meat to preserve it as backup food. Still others in Botswana are being employed by photographic safari camps where visitors come to view and photograph wildlife. They support the proconservation policies that attract tourists.
All that said, Dr. Songhurst and HEAL are working hard on practical solutions. She has introduced some mitigation strategies to try to keep the elephants out of crop fields and other areas. Some farmers string cans together on wires around their fields to create a noisy racket when an elephant pushes against the line. They have rigged up battery-powered electric fences designed to throw off repelling shocks if the elephants come in contact with them. Most crop raiding occurs at night, so blinking lights charged during the day by solar panels also discourage the animals from approaching. Some farmers carry solar-powered flashlights and sleep at night in watch huts, running into the field if an elephant invades, and banging drums and shining lights to ward it off.
However, the black cloths on the line at regular intervals are one element of the area’s most widespread mitigation tools. Elephants, it turns out, hate chilies; the chemical in the seeds, capsicum, irritates the lining of their trunks. Throughout Africa, farmers in areas where elephant encroachment is an issue have been experimenting with how to disperse chili capsicum in the air to get elephants to back off. Some farmers create “cakes” of dung mixed with chili seeds. Then they build small, rectangular troughs along the perimeter of their fields and set the cakes on fire when the crop is at a vulnerable stage right before harvest. They’re designed to burn for hours and throw off the chili scent.
The black cloths flapping here in the Okavango have been soaked in oil and ground-up chili seeds and hung about five feet above ground. According to Dr. Songhurst, elephant footprints around her camp (the researchers have a large garden plot behind their tents) show that the large mammals lumber straight up to the fence, but then wheel around and leave once they encounter the chili-soaked cloths. It’s cheap, it’s nonviolent, and it works without putting people or elephants in jeopardy.
To protect themselves and their crops, villagers in rural Botswana build fences draped with chili pepper–soaked cloths to repel the elephants. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
Mitigation tools like this will be vital for the foreseeable future. Dr. Songhurst is also attempting to teach local farmers to improve their yields and techniques so that they produce more food without having to take over more land. This prompted me to think that the region could be an excellent laboratory to further demonstrate our conviction that conservation agriculture is important whether you’re farming one thousand acres of soybeans in Illinois or two acres of sorghum in Botswana.
Dr. Songhurst and Dr. McCulloch believe that if yields can be improved economically, the size of agricultural land needed by farmers can be reduced. Farmers will protect and enhance their existing soil quality instead of wearing it out and needing to move on. Higher yields can mean smaller fields, which are easier to protect from raiding animals. I went into one of the local fields and came away optimistic: although the soil was sandy, there was organic matter in the top inches. Planting cover crops, leaving plant residues in place, and applying some fertilizer to the soil would be likely to have a pretty dramatic effect on yield at the field I visited.
SHOULD FARMERS LET THE DOGS OUT?
Unfortunately, Dr. Songhurst has found the local Botswana farmers reluctant to use new methods. They still plow, and traditionally they plant by tossing, or “broadcasting,” seed by hand, which is an inefficient method. I asked the researchers to arrange a meeting with a local chief and some farmers so that we could talk about this when I was there. We met in an open-air concrete structure in Gunotsoga, a local village that survived mostly through subsistence farming. (Funny aside: in this remote place, where many adults and children did not even have shoes, quite a few people attending the meeting periodically would answer their cell phones and duck outside for a quick conversation. It reminded me of meetings at companies in the United States—except for the bare feet.)
The farmers appreciate the work Dr. Songhurst has done teaching them mitigation techniques such as using chilies. I offered to send several farmers to a training program at our Ukulima Farm in South Africa so that they could bring back information on more sustainable soil and farming techniques to teach their peers (this happened in February 2013). We also discussed whether obtaining a seed variety that has a shorter growing season might help these farmers by allowing them to harvest their fields before the most intense elephant migrations take place during the dry season.
As I was leaving, a man came up to me and offered his own idea: training dogs to chase elephants out of the crop fields. I’ve seen trained dogs used in some creative ways in Africa, including scaring off cheetahs from menacing cattle. “I think you may have something there. That’s an interesting idea!” I told him.
There are other ideas to resolve this situation that might stand a better chance of changing the fundamentals, but they would demand regional and even cross-border cooperation. If there was a way to create transborder corridors for the elephants so they could migrate beyond the Okavango Panhandle back into Angola and Namibia, the issue of their density here could be relieved. But so-called veterinary fences block their reentry along stretches of those borders. These fences were erected in the latter half of the twentieth century to separate local cattle from water buffalo and other species that transmit disease. Unfortunately, they also bisect certain migration routes. Their impact has devastated migrating herds such as wildebeest and zebra, which are sometimes trapped during periods of drought—and the fences have bottled up thousands of elephants. “Some from the communities wan
t to reinforce the fences, others want to remove them,” noted Dr. Stronza.
I explained in the story of our water initiative that I once had the opportunity to explore an irrigation project in Angola designed to capture more water from the lush springs that serve as the headwaters of the Okavango Delta system. I passed on the plan when I realized that those involved had not invested in any kind of research or analysis of what the downstream impact of diverting the water might have on the Okavango. However, there is growing pressure in Angola to revive these plans today. That decision will have important consequences here to the south. Realizing how connected all these issues are, I reached out to Dr. Ed Price to see if we can get an assessment through Texas A&M to understand the dynamics of the irrigation projects in Angola and determine what the effects could be for Botswana.
Dr. Songhurst’s work is focused not just on mitigation and conservation farming development. She also is trying to sort out some of the fundamental ecosystem elements. How fast are the elephants reproducing? Getting accurate data on this question is not easy. Despite this density of elephants, they do not generally live in giant herds that can be tracked easily. Even from the air, you rarely see more than twenty or thirty at a time, and usually you see fewer than that. Making headway on this may involve purchasing radio tracking collars for a select group of elephants.
Another challenge is to sort out fact from fiction. Human-animal conflicts can stir intense but also primitive emotions. I have observed on our own property in South Africa that farmers sometimes perceive a threat from wild animals to be greater than it is. One of our neighbors at Ukulima who raises livestock called our farm one day to say that one of our cheetahs had gotten out and onto his land, where he had trapped it. We were skeptical because our cheetahs have radio collars, and we track them, and we knew they were both inside our fence. When we investigated, it was not a cheetah at all: it was a serval, a spotted cat less than half the size of a cheetah. After a tragic event such as the incident involving the woman who was killed by an elephant shortly before our visit, exaggerated stories of rampaging elephant herds can begin to spread.
Our hope is that studying a system this complicated can help the people affected right now and also help us develop better models for untangling complex conflict situations elsewhere. I went to the Okavango in search of a mental image for that startling statistic of one elephant for every person. I returned with my mind and camera bursting with images of life in this diverse, priceless ecosystem. Now the question is: What is the right combination of experts to bring together to work on this complicated problem?
Story 28
Can Smarter Carrots Save Soil?
If you are an American who paid federal taxes in the last two decades, I can tell you where some of the money went. Since 1995, I have received $306,274 in US Department of Agriculture subsidies. I opted out of the program in 2009.1
Farming subsidies are a touchy subject in America, and US subsidies are a touchy subject around the world. Depending on where you stand, subsidies can trigger a heated and emotional response from farmers, from groups battling for federal funding for other important sectors such as health or education, and from agricultural interests abroad that feel the subsidies depress international commodity prices.
There is no question that subsidies began as a way to shore up a depressed and struggling sector of the US economy during a period when most farmers were poor. Today many of these payments end up in the mailboxes of absentee landowners. The USDA calculates that the top 12.4 percent of US farms in terms of gross receipts received 62.2 percent of the government payments in 2009.2 This exists despite the fact that Congress imposes payment limits on high-income farmers.
My dad made headlines in 2012 when he remarked that his assistant pays a higher income tax rate than he does. Financially, he benefited from that situation, but the discrepancy began to concern him. Some people thought he was a hero for stating this openly. Others suggested that he mischaracterized the situation for political reasons and that his motives could not be as simple as pointing out a basic inequity. I can tell you that my father does not like to overpay for anything. He was speaking from his core beliefs.
Farming has helped support my family for thirty years, and I’m not at all ashamed that I used every technology and legal opportunity I had available to maximize my return. But my thinking about the larger consequences of our subsidy policy has evolved as well. Like my dad, I realize this change in my thinking means I may make new friends and lose old ones, or solidify old friendships and scare off potential partners or allies.
SUBSIDY DESIGN NEEDS TO EVOLVE
Subsidies were essential to building a thriving agricultural system in the United States. There is a vital role for them at home and in the developing world in the future. A government’s most basic duties are to protect its people and ensure that they are fed. Subsidies, agricultural extension, and other forms of farm support keep governments engaged in the capacity and flexibility of the food system—as they must be to ensure the long-term viability of the food supply and respond to emergencies. One of the most disastrous contributions the World Bank made to Africa in the 1980s was to outlaw agricultural subsidies—indeed, to deemphasize agriculture—and try to shove fragile economies into a “free market” mode too early and without the ability to compete.
In the United States, we have subsidized crop insurance, a program that goes back to the 1930s and helps protect farmers against natural perils or dramatic price drops for commodities. Because farming is both vital and uniquely risky, subsidized crop insurance has remained critical for the sector. As I write, the US agricultural sector is still recovering from a dramatic drought in 2012. On my Illinois farm, we harvested 23 bushels per acre of corn on ground that has averaged 175 bushels per acre over the past five years. It was the first time in my farming life that I cut soybeans that outyielded my corn. Without crop insurance, a year like that could have pushed many farmers out of business.
Despite the positives of these programs, I believe Washington must learn to use subsidies in a more practical and rational way. We should end nearly eight decades of subsidizing crop production and instead figure out how to subsidize and incentivize highly productive farming practices that conserve limited natural resources—namely, soil and water. If you haven’t slammed this book shut yet, let me tell you how I got here.
INCENTIVES FOR EXPANSION
A pivotal moment in US history was the Homestead Act of 1862. At the time, land to the west seemed limitless, but US leaders debated how they should manage that expansion. The South wanted large land parcels to go to plantation owners, who wanted to use slave labor to farm them. But the North prevailed, and the federal government instead invited small farmers to go west for the promise of getting title to their own land. A US citizen could gain title to 160 acres of public land for free in exchange for farming it. Homesteaders eventually claimed 270 million acres of land, including nearly half the entire state of Nebraska.
The politics of the day were complicated, but the upshot was good for American agriculture: With that land title came pride and a long-term, multigenerational perspective. It gave farmers collateral to obtain credit. It helped them put down roots. To be sure, a lot of homesteaders weren’t successful, but the program created the right conditions to establish a new class of independent farmers in America.
Around the same period, Washington also established the US Department of Agriculture to fund research, regulate markets, and provide economic information to growers. The federal government’s involvement in agriculture expanded into subsidies during the Great Depression, when Congress decided that the nation’s food security was a vital asset. Because of low commodity prices and drought in Dust Bowl states such as Oklahoma and Kansas, farmers were abandoning their land. About a quarter of the nation’s population lived on farms then, and as a group, they formed one of the poorest segments of society.3
There are many important sectors of the economy, but the
food supply is so essential that the government’s support during these difficult times was appropriate. Aside from the obvious importance of food itself, farming is a uniquely risky enterprise: farmers are at the mercy of the weather, interest rates, currency prices, government policies, and fluctuations in the commodity markets. High prices aren’t much good to farmers when a crop disaster has left them with nothing to sell. Big crops tend to depress prices received by farmers, and they can’t quickly adjust what they plant and produce in time to recover from plunging prices in a given season. Farmers depend on commodity markets in which they have no leverage. As my dad says, “When a farmer pulls his truck into an ADM elevator, no one asks, ‘Is that Howie Buffett’s corn?’ ”
To stabilize the farm economy, early on Congress established a target price for certain crops such as wheat, corn, and cotton. By 1940, federal spending on agriculture and rural development represented 16 percent of the budget, more than defense and second only to spending on commerce and transportation.4
40 Chances Page 24