Souylemane (second to the right) and other technicians gather to learn about tree care.

By Lindsay Cobb and Ashleigh Burgess
SILVER SPRING, Maryland, USA, Feb 28 2020 (IPS)

Souylemane Samb sits under a crowded tent on a hot Senegalese day. He wears a canvas vest with Trees for the Future printed across the back.

Despite his dark sunglasses, his expression is easy to read – the tall 43-year-old is smiling contentedly as he waves a flag that says “Kaffrine 2 Graduation Day.”

Souylemane is at a graduation for more than 200 farmers celebrating the completion of a four-year agroforestry program with Trees for the Future (TREES). Using what TREES calls the Forest Garden Approach for the last four years, the farmers have successfully planted themselves out of hunger and poverty.

Souylemane is an Assistant Technician for TREES, his job is to work with farmers and help them become experts in agroforestry and regenerative agriculture. Ultimately helping them succeed as farmers in a region and climate where farmers don’t typically fare well.

As he presents diplomas to graduating farmers, Souylemane remembers being in their position. In 2018 Souylemane graduated from the TREES program himself, after joining the program in 2015.

Obstacles in Farming

“Before joining TREES, my land was not well organized. I planted things randomly and with no real knowledge of how best to do it or what kinds of crops to pick,” he recalls. “My soil was also degraded from years of chemical use.”

A farmer all his life, Souylamene points out that farmers like him were never set up for success. Despite practicing agriculture for centuries, he says farming has never really evolved in a way that benefits both the land and the farmer.

“Farmers want to do the work but they don’t always know how to do the work, how long things take to grow, or seasonal and market planning.”

Recalling some of the biggest challenges he faced before implementing the Forest Garden Approach, Souylemane says deforestation is rampant in Senegal because farmers are forced to cut down what little tree cover they have to try to protect what little crop production they can achieve.

“Now live fencing saves money, so we have no more worries that animals will get in. The principal aspect and foundation of Forest Gardens is protection! It’s the number one most important thing! And now we feel our land can flourish, and all the life that comes with it can flourish, too.”

Seed supply was another major obstacle for him.

“There were many seasons that I unknowingly bought bad seeds from market. I spent 50,000 CFA (about $100 USD), that was a third of my entire earnings for the year back then. I spent all that money and nothing came up. Nothing came of it!”

Souylemane and fellow technician Namang visit Forest Garden farmers throughout the region by motorcycle.

A Reliable Support System

In late 2014, he met a TREES technician while in town. Although he says he was weary of another international development organization in his community, he decided to attend an informational meeting to learn more about the program.

“We’ve had many interactions with organizations trying to help us, but none has spoken truth like Trees for the Future,” he says today. “Everyone in Kaffrine, all of the Forest Garden farmers, say they have never seen a project as successful as this.”

Souylemane joined the program at the beginning of 2015 and soon began learning everything about agroforestry from his Forest Garden Training manual and the TREES technicians.

“Training has brought me so much knowledge! I learned about agroforestry and its importance for making farms better, faster,” he says. “I learned how to graft, how to organize my field, tree pruning, nursery care, composting, how to save and select seeds.”

Souylemane also participated in TREES’ water initiative. In semi-arid Senegal, farmers like must have a reliable source of water, but with such little tree cover, wells can regularly dry up.

To break this cycle of poor groundwater recharge and rapid evaporation, TREES launched its Loxo Loxo program in 2019, connecting farmers’ land to a central water source in town. Souylemane says the water initiative helped improve his land even more.

Finding Success in the Forest Garden

Where before, he was growing meager crops of chili peppers, lettuce, and okra, Souylamene now proudly describes a completely different world.

“When you open the door you see two piles of compost, tons of big trees that are pruned properly, crops growing in the alleys between trees. We have a water spigot now and so many varieties of vegetable crops. You can hear the sounds of birds, bees, wind that comes and passes over the garden… peace only.”

“But it’s a lot of work to get to that point!” he adds.

A lot of work that he says was most certainly worth it. Today, Souylemane, his wife, and their five kids are living healthier and more stable lives. With diverse foods in their garden he says their nutrition has improved greatly and they can now make a consistent living from their harvests.

“I have things to sell at the market now, before I did not. I would go and buy things but I rarely had anything I could sell there. Now I bring my vegetables and I make money.”

A Bright Future

Often, Forest Garden farmers report using their newfound income to pay for their children’s school fees. With his Forest Garden income and his salary as a TREES technician, Souylamene can afford to send his younger children to school and his older daughters to university where they are studying business and law.

As a technician, Souylemane says he enjoys being able to help other farmers change their land and lives.

“I’ve never seen a program so successful that is reflective, well-conceived, that really takes farmers out of poverty. TREES accompanies them sustainably through all of these steps and then that’s it, they have the skills they need for the rest of their lives!”

When he comes home from a day of traveling to other farmers’ Forest Gardens, he says his favorite thing to find in his own garden is tomatoes.

“Tomatoes! Sometimes I will just eat them raw with a little salt. Or my wife will pick some lettuce fresh from the garden and we make a salad with dressing and dinner is ready.”

The Kaffrine 2 graduation marks five years since Souylamene joined Trees for the Future and became a Forest Garden farmer. He is one of 75,000+ farmers to have joined the Forest Garden Training Program.

Learn more about Trees for the Future’s work with smallholder farmers, and visit their Forest Garden Training Center to learn how to implement regenerative agriculture practices.

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A fire in the East Gippsland region of Victoria, December 30, 2019. Photo by Ned Dawson for Victoria State Government.

By John Leary and Lindsay Cobb
SILVER SPRINGS, Maryland, Jan 13 2020 (IPS)

“Unprecedented.” “Hell on Earth.” “Catastrophic.”

In Australia, these terms are being used to describe 17.9 million acres of burned land so far. While fires of this magnitude are certainly unprecedented, they’re far from unexpected.

Climatologists have warned that the changing climate will have vast implications for our planet’s weather patterns and natural disasters. But these warnings have done little to drive urgent climate action.

More and more it seems that the world needs anthropologists, not climatologists, to understand the real trajectory of climate change, trends, long-term impacts, “Band-Aid” solutions, and to pinpoint the root causes.

The reason for the magnitude of these fires is complex and certainly requires attention to climate, but it can all be traced back to one thing: How we grow our food.

Fire Begets Food

Humans have been influencing the land and environment for the sake of food for centuries.

Australia’s landscape did not always look like it does today. Historians and scientists can point back to a time when humans’ need for food completely altered the continent’s natural makeup.

50,000 years ago, Australian Aboriginals used “fire stick farming” as a way to hunt large animals. Equipped with torches, humans burned forests to drive out, trap and kill things to eat.

This tactic happened on such an extreme level in Australia that humans were able to drive hairy rhinoceroses, massive birds, giant kangaroos, wombats, and other massive marsupials to extinction. Humans forever changed Australia’s plant and wildlife.

Sadly, this practice is still in use today and we’ve seen it up close in places such as Mali and Central African Republic. But a different form of “fire farming” is used on a much larger scale in the 21st century.

The modern global food system is dependent on open land because monocropped cereal grains are at the core of our diets. Growing rows of grain is cost-effective, it can be fed to animals, and it is easily turned into processed food.

The agriculture industry and farmers of every kind have cleared trees at a rate of 5 million hectares a year to make room for crops like corn, wheat, and soy. The easiest ways to do this are either spray the area with an herbicide that kills plants or by lighting fires to burn and clear the land of trees, shrubs, and grasses.

This is called swidden, or slash-and-burn agriculture. It has plagued farmers for centuries and it is exactly what is happening to the Amazon.

Food Begets Fire

Setting aside the lasting developmental and health implications of the global diet, the destructive land use practices to achieve this diet are 1) unsustainable and 2) the leading cause of climate change.

As the population increases, our need for food production increases. Humans work to grow more food and clear more land. As forests are burned and cleared, carbon is released into the atmosphere and ecosystems are strained.

Excess carbon has nowhere to go and increases temperatures. Higher temperatures exacerbate drought and the breakdown of ecosystems and environmental health. It becomes harder to grow food in these conditions, so more land is cleared to feed the growing population.

High temperatures and drought also mean wildfires are more likely to burn out of control. This negative feedback loop is cut and dry: fire causes warming, warming causes fire.

In a cruel irony, often the offenders on the ground do not experience the worst of these effects. Weather systems and patterns are liable to change around the world, affecting the most vulnerable people first.

This is true for the smallholder farmers in Trees for the Future’s Forest Garden program. Farming families in developing countries are subject to the impacts of climate change with no control over seed supply, no crop insurance, and few municipal programs for a safety net.

Although, there is one major outlier in the disproportionate effects of climate change: Australia. Long-standing climatic predictions have suggested that Australia would be an exception – a developed country facing the dramatic repercussions of man-made climate change, despite its GDP.

“The country was founded on genocidal indifference to the native landscape and those who inhabited it, and its modern ambitions have always been precarious: Australia is today a society of expansive abundance, jerry-rigged onto a very harsh and ecologically unforgiving land,” writes David Wallace-Wells in An Uninhabitable Earth.

Wood Burns, Woods Don’t

A healthy forest is full of wood and yet, it cannot burn.

Why? Consider how to build a campfire: A camper needs tinder, kindling, and fuel. Tinder and kindling are critical in turning a spark into a flame. Once the flame is truly established, the camper adds fuel to the fire in the form of logs and the logs are able to maintain the burn.

Even in the dry season, where there may be small isolated fires across a dry landscape, a forest should not burn uncontrollably. But today, many forests around the globe are surrounded by “tinder.”

A common form of tinder is brush and grassland maintained for grazing animals like cow or sheep. Another is parched crops or what is left behind after harvest: crop residue, the stubble of a cut grain still attached to the root.

Farmers around the globe – American, Iraqi, and Australian – are all too familiar with the danger a lightning storm poses in the dry season. A lightning strike can literally destroy hundreds of acres of a crop or grasslands in a matter of minutes.

Put that field next to a forest during prolonged drought and a spark from a transformer or lightning storm has plenty of dry tinder and kindling to get started.

The Australian fires burning right now are countless. Fires are raging all over the country; bushland, forests, national parks, and farmland now burning were all parched in the wake of record-breaking heat and drought.

The country is a veritable tinderbox, and with plenty of fuel in their path, little can be done to stop the fires as they envelope swaths of countryside.

How We Fix It

Food production is the problem, but it’s also the solution.

When the agriculture industry and smallholder farmers embrace sustainable farming methods, incorporate trees into the growing process, and find alternatives to monocropping, their impact on the environment will change for the better.

Farmers have historically fought suggestions of man-made climate change because of the implications for their bottom line. But as they start to feel the effects of a warming climate and recognize that land use is a major contributor to the problem, many farmers are turning a corner and becoming climate activists themselves.

In Australia, nonprofit Farmers for Climate Action supports “farmers to build climate and energy literacy and advocate for climate solutions both on and off farm.” It’s groups like this that will be integral in shifting public understanding and support of a transformational food system.

Trees for the Future works with farmers in sub-Saharan Africa who have long practiced slash-and-burn tactics to clear land for monocrops like maize or peanuts. These farmers are contributing to deforestation, and the prolonged periods of drought they suffer through are evidence that they’re feeling the impacts of man-made climate change.

Fortunately, shortly after they integrate trees and sustainability into their farming, these farmers see vast improvements in their soil health, biodiversity, and micro-climates. Abandoning monocrop techniques for agroforestry and regenerative methods also increases their production and incomes – proving that changing the way we farm does not translate to a decrease in profits, but rather the opposite.

Much like financial diversity, crop diversity helps to ensure resilience in the face of unexpected challenges and environmental strains.

“Trees once provided natural protection, acting as dug-in soldiers shielding countries from typhoons, hurricanes, and monsoons. They covered the country sides, cooled the land, brought the rain and channeled excess water back into the ground,” write John Leary in One Shot: Trees as Our Last Chance for Survival.

“Trees provide both CO2 reduction and mitigation, serving as a nonpartisan weapon that is exempt from climate politics, whose beneficial existence is not subject to scientific evidence or debate. So their value should be recognized, right?”

When we stop clearing our trees and start embracing their benefits, we’ll see a shift in the negative climate trends plaguing regions subject to natural disasters.

We can create a positive feedback loop wherein planting more trees and ending deforestation results in predictable weather patterns, healthier ecosystems, and fewer trees lost to unprecedented, catastrophic wildfires.

*Learn more about Trees for the Future’s work with smallholder farmers, and visit their Forest Garden Training Center to learn how to implement regenerative agriculture practices.

Remember to give responsibly when donating to Australia wildfire response efforts. Trees for the Future is working to end hunger and poverty for smallholder farmers through revitalizing degraded lands. Learn more about Trees for the Future and see their latest data in their 30th Anniversary Special Edition 2019 Impact Report.

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