Ethiopian Highlands
Ethiopian Highlands. Tyler Case, 2021. nail and thumb on living canvas. Cardano Conks
from JEES-Vol.6 No.1 2016 (core.ac.uk)
“The principal environmental problem in the Eastern African highlands is land degradation, manifested mainly in the form of soil erosion, gully formation, soil fertility loss, water scarcity, and reductions in crop yield.”
“Livestock in the region provide about 16.4 million tonnes of manure annually, equivalent to 114 thousand tonnes of nitrogen, which is being used primarily for fuel rather than manure (CEDEP, 1999)”
(300) Regreening Ethiopia's Highlands: A New Hope for Africa - YouTube an incomplete picture
Watching the video, we’d get a sense that the hoofsteps of livestock are leading to degredation of pasture in the Ethiopian Highlands and that forcing livestock to move for their forage expends dense calories that otherwise could be enjoyed by people. The solution that is documented in the video is a system where livestock, instead of actively grazing, are sheltered in a small area and grasses are harvested and delivered to them by people. Effectively, pastoral shepherds (which go back many millenia in Ethiopia) become hay farmers managing livestock in confinement.
This may be an improvement, but perhaps it doesn’t address the root of the problem. With Cardano’s hard-earned presence in Ethiopia and 5 million students given digital identities, there is a way to accomplish widespread adoption of more ecologically and nutritionally sound livestock management practices. We believe in the people of Ethiopia and hope that Regenseed can eventually help facilitate students who want to help solve these problems.
The Ethiopian highlands are rugged, much of the land is sloping. Much of this land used to be forested, or partially forested, or in a state of dynamic management by large wild herbivores who tend to promulgate a savannah-like ecosystem with diverse grasses and woody perennials. These savannah ecosystems are well studied in regenerative ecology- they make efficient use of solar energy and support larger mammalian biomass than any other ecosystem. In active management by farmers/shepherds/ranchers, these mixed polyculture-based systems with heavy reliance on ungulates (ruminants) are called “silvopasture.” When poorly managed pasture or annual-grain fed factory farming is converted to silvopasture and mob grazing-style herd management, we turn carbon-positive, extractive agriculture, into a diverse, resilient, productive system that pulls carbon out of the air and stores it inside the soil food web to provide the substrate for a well-fed, stable society.
I can’t pretend to know what is the best way to run ruminants through the rough terrain of the Ethiopian Highlands. And we know from permaculture that there is no one-size fits all; that one technique may be great on one side of a mountain but terrible on the other. But I do know that often the best place to start is to look to nature and indigenous land management practices. There is surely a wealth of invaluable knowledge amongst the older generation of shepherds. Amongst those, there are likely some small untouched pockets out there who are continuing to improve on these age-old techniques. There is so much knowledge and people power to leverage to make Ethiopia’s food supply more sustainable. And so much potential energy and genius lying fallow in the students in Ethiopia, waiting to be unleashed.
Elsewhere on the globe are similar tropical highlands with similar rain patterns to those in Ethiopia
Charles Hoskinson talks a lot about fertilizer. How proper use of fertilizer has provided food for billions of people and can help a failing farmer become profitable and bring more food to market. This has been the case, but the story runs deeper, and the future isn’t so clear. Relying on annuals and difficult to manage pasture is a recip for fragility. We are talking about creating a food system that can keep running, keep producing come drought, locusts (for real, locusts, this is Africa…), civil war, spiking fuel costs, global economic panic… The discourse on Food is very primitive, and I find that even the smartest people in the world often don’t understand the basics of the food system and nutrient cycling. Digging wells to give farmers access to water for crops, like using fertiliizer, might not always be the right answer. There is certainly a place for chemical fertilizer, and a place for wells, but they are only one set of tools amongst many many others, and they are tools that come with downsides by definition: one being disruption of natural nutrient cycling amongst lifeforms in the soil, the other being acquifers that increasingly recharge at a fraction of the rate that they are withdrawn.
Back to the article. The part that stood out to me was that because wood is in such short supply thanks to deforestation and thinning of soils. So people, in need of a fuel source to heat and cook food, turn to manure. Anyone with a background in permaculture would hear this and think, at the very least- what a shame! What a shame to burn beautiful ungulate poo- the exact fertility that the pasture has evolved to receive.
Perhaps it isn’t so much the hoofs that are degrading the pasture, but the hoofs in the absence of manure. If the herder scoops up poo and burns it, all that carbon and that nitrogen and that miraculous web of microbes that have evolved inside the rumens of ruminants to feed back into the soil and provide fertility for the next wave of growth— all that fertility goes up in smoke, dirty smoke filled with nitrogen that in turn acidifies rainwater, further impacting soil and ecosystem health. Manure is needed to provide the carbon sponge to receive liquid nitrogen in the form of urine. Without this sponge, urine goes from a source of fertility to a source of toxin- on bare soil it oxidizes in the sun, and any nitrogen that escapes oxidation and absorbs into the dirt is more likely to fuel plants that have not evolved alongside ruminants. The same can be said of applying chemical fertilizer to poorly managed pasture.
It seems that this problem cannot be solved without a better, regenerative, fuel source. Perhaps one area that Ethiopian scholars and students can explore is sources of woody fuel that grow fast and can grow in thinned soil and can be harvested without negatively impacting the soil below. Perhaps there are appropriate fuel crops that provide secondary benefits in the form of erosion control, shade, food- for livestock, for people. Humans have lived in Ethiopia since, well, the beginning. That whole time, people have been living in these landscapes, hunting and herding. I’m confident that nature holds the answer to the problem of “what to burn.”
And perhaps there are processes that require heat that could use a different energy source. The ethiopian highlands are cooler than the lowlands, but they get just as much sun (actually more thanks to the thinner atmosphere). The region is quite close to the equator, so even in the cooler season, there’s a lot of solar energy available for much of the year. Once as a proof of concept, I acheived pasturization temperatures for mushroom substrate using only a cardboard gaylord, reflective foil, and a black bag inside a clear bag to hold the substrate. A similar, less jinky version could be deployed to, e.g. bake injera. Meaning the manure can stay on the pasture, support more livestock so you can have some tibs with that injera.
Maybe there are better cookstoves- cookstoves designed for use with regenerative woody fuel source.
But, maybe there will need to be, for a time, a supply chain established to get oil burners to these farmers touse while they wait for regenerative fuel sources to reach harvestable age. That way, all that manure can feed the soil and help establish those woody fuels and grow more pasture for more livestock. You see, many of the incentive structures to move to regenerative techniques are there, but it takes system thinking and imagination and collaboration to deploy- and often times the biggest challenge is the funding up front. Perennial systems take years, and the initial transition period requires the most resources and labor. Regenerative farmers across the globe are unbanked, and many more future regenerative farmers don’t have a means to deploy their labor in the market. That can all change with an economy driven by long-term view instead of immediate profit extraction.
If Regenseed.io becomes something, we hope that we can help channel resources to the good people of Ethiopia to help support them in some way to research and deploy regenerative land management systems. I’ve laid out my initial thoughts on the subject but I am no expert. The experts quite likely are up there in the remote highlands, doing a form of agroforestry and pasture management that their ancestors have done. These people, however remote, are feeling the pressure on the ecosystem wrought by poor management elsewhere, and they will succomb to top-down edicts from so-called experts that say “to feed these millions of people, we need to grow our food This way.” And, the This is often misinformed, waited heavily towards industrial technology at the expense of building generations of stability into the food system.
Advancements in social and economic technologies- the kind that Cardano is facilitating adoption of in Ethiopia- represent the most powerful technologies to turn around the way we grow our food. We represent the quiet voice of nature and history that says: this way worked, and now with information and financing and free association and a generation of young people ready to change the world, we can use this technology to transform the landscape into one that can provide for a growing population for many generations to come.
**To get in the weeds with individual species, I turn to Eric Toensmeier’s book “The Carbon Farming Solution.” Two crops that are good candidates for Ethiopian Highlands- one is enset, and it’s being grown all over the region but could certainly scale up. It’s full of starch and a decent source of protein. It has issues- with nematodes to name one- but the full panoply of regenerative pest management systems have yet to be explored. The other is Vetever primarily for erosion control in paddies.
A challenge with enset is that it is somewhat labor intensive to process it by hand- to separate the fibers from the nutritious flesh. Laborious, but there is plenty of nutritional surplus. The mind immediately goes to what new machines can we get into the hands of enset growers to help them cut down the labor time. Perhaps machines are the best route- and even the most regenerative one if it is the way to incentivize herders and farmers en masse to grow enset, thereby protecting soil from erosion and its downstream effects. But maybe there’s another tool we can use to create the same incentives. If we think of it from first principles we have to at least ask the question: what might we lose when we take human hands out of the process?