I was sent along with the senior officers and staff non-commissioned officers to a five day training course at Fresno State, the first of its kind. We had two main faculty who spent each day with us and led the wrap-up discussions following the final class on each subject. The course was broken down as follows: basics of small farms and soil analysis; irrigation; livestock; food crops and "agribusiness"; and post-harvest. An eight-hour training day was devoted to each topic.
We opened with an overview of the whole course, the instructors' backgrounds, and our expectations. After a brief presentation on the agricultural history of Afghanistan, our first class on soil began. The rhythm and sequence of instruction was familiar to anyone with military experience. A broad treatment of soil and its attendant issues followed by several narrowly focused classes before a Q&A session and break. After spending ten minutes trying to forget everything we just learned, the group reassembled and began the practical application portion, or "prac app" as it's known by Marines.
For the first day, our prac app was folded into a tour of the Fresno State farm, which is really a group of small farms with very different organizations and growing practices. We trudged through monocultures of corn in various stages of growth, then walked around small organic plots with at least ten plant varieties coexisting happily. Orchards of fruit trees, a new miniature kind of olive tree known as
arbequina, large vineyards, and even a small area managed by a solar-powered sprinkler system were all on display. At each stop our instructors would point out the basic characteristics of the field and then focus on the soil and how it was helping (or hindering) optimal growth.
The most hands-on portion of day one was actually in a small lab near our classroom. Various tubs of soil were laid out on a table with little squeeze bottles of water next to each one. We had to take a handful of the dirt, get it wet, and identify the soil type. This required clenching, squeezing, rolling, fingering, pinching, and otherwise manhandling mud for the better part of an hour. We learned to notice little differences between sandier, siltier, and more clay-like soils.
It would become apparent on the second day during our irrigation courses just how much of an important the composition of the ground would have on crop yield and long-term agricultural viability. Given the primitive/dilapidated nature of Afghanistan's irrigation system, we could expect to have substantial impacts on productivity if irrigation could be better-matched with ground conditions.
We were attending the first run of this course, and the instructors were learning just as much as we were. Our irrigation training made this quite clear: we ended up spending time learning about technologically advanced systems of water distribution requiring electricity, trained mechanics, and a stable water source. Although our teachers had experience in many developing countries, they were still farmers and wanted to show off the best and brightest. Good feedback thus became crucial to this course's value; we needed to make the most of our allotted training and constantly focused the instruction on conditions we could expect to see once we arrived in Afghanistan.
By far my favorite day was the third, livestock. We spent the morning in the classroom learning about basic biological and physiological characteristics of ruminants (goats, cattle, sheep). These are the most common large animals in Afghanistan and represent much of a poor farmer's "investment" in the future. In a country with where per capita GDP hovers around $450, one goat worth $70 is nothing to scoff at.
Immediately after lunch the group ended up at nearby Reedley, a small two-year community college. There was a brief meet-and-greet with one professor and a few students, then we dove into an afternoon that should have been called Sheep 101. It covered a little bit of everything. We were given a chance to try herding approximately twenty-five sheep around a large pen, and learned quickly how difficult that can be with only one person. Our teacher for the afternoon relayed several tricks about minimizing your size, slowing your approach,and ascending toward them up a hill. These all shrink the sheep's "flight zone", the area around them you can't penetrate without provoking some kind of movement.
Next the sheep were herded into a small paddock and the day got a lot more interesting. Here we were taught handling skills: what direction to come from, where to grab their hind legs, where to grab their head, how to make them sit down, and so on. After an hour or so getting dirty, I felt confident I could tell if a sheep was having any major problems through a combination of visual, behavioral, and physical clues.
A two month-old lamb had died sometime the night before and this provided us an opportunity to see and touch the viscera. At this point several of the city-dwellers in our group showed their stripes and graciously bowed out, while the rest of us with at least a minimum of farm exposure hunkered down to smell what Lambchop had for dinner the night before.
Day four focused on agricultural business, or agribusiness as it's now known familiarly. This was mostly a study of various crops that grow in southern Afghanistan representing potential competitors to poppy. We covered many options and closest one from a commercial standpoint was actually marijuana-an odd coincidence. The big takeaway from this day was born of one instructor's experience in Africa: intercropping. Instead of trying to directly compete in a one crop to one crop model (e.g. wheat as a substitute for poppy) we should present alternatives with overlapping crops that can cumulatively match illicit crop's market price. The best example of this was a wheat/clover/honey combination with the added advantages of controlling pests, reducing vulnerability to bacteria, and diversifying income sources.
We wrapped up training with post-harvest activities. This could be anything from drying to storing to marketing and often involved all three. Many interesting and "low-tech" options for processing were presented in the morning and our group left with schematics for several solar dryers, a great option for Afghan farmers who grow pomegranates, cherries, grapes, and other cash crops.
Certificates and handshakes went around on Friday evening at the university president's house a few miles off campus. I left with forty hours of instruction under my belt, thirty pages of notes, over four hundred pages of material, and (most importantly) a little glimpse into a farmer's mindset. The value of this training lay mostly in its ability to get our group to look at the land differently or, as one instructor put it on the first day, to guess us "to think like dirt."
