Through funding from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Tillers has been invited by Land O’Lakes International (based in Shoreview, MN) to provide animal traction training for the small dairy farms they are helping in Mozambique through their Food For Progress program. They will be working in the province of Manica out of the town of Chimoio. Tillers’ staff members Brian Webb and Rob Burdick flew out of Kalamazoo with bags of tools on March 16th. Brian will stay through the three years of the project. Rob is there for the first three months to help set up a Learning Center for animal power at a local agricultural school.
Training will start with a two week version of our Oxen Basics class, in which farmers/trainees will follow three-year-old oxen through the training process. These sessions will quickly move from the Chimoio Learning Center to villages as a group of trainers is developed and target villages are identified. A young Mozambiquan from the Land O’Lakes crew, Candido Cumbane, will be joining Brian and Rob to help develop the training corps. He will receive accelerated training over the next few weeks. We need an outstanding group of trainers. The target is to reach thousands of farmers in groups of 25 or less through this village-based training within three years. As in Uganda, these trainers will be drawn from the best ox-powered farms, will be trained in the training of others, and will do most of their training in the off-seasons.
Jan Ott (Tillers intern, 1992) and Andrew Roberts (2008) came to Kalamazoo for a week to polish the training modules for the course. They each helped guide sessions in Uganda with experienced farmers/trainers and had received some high quality feedback on the content of the previous edition of the training modules. We are also developing more supplemental resources for the trainers: specialized publications, videos, demonstration tools, and exercise plans.
As the Chimoio Learning Center grows, we will begin offering additional training there for the farmers/trainers and for artisans. Early on, we should be offering weeding systems for advanced farmers and yoke making for woodworkers and blacksmiths. We will then build up to the skills of cart making and road building. Brian and Rob are setting up an apartment in Chimoio where Rob and other volunteers and staff who follow can stay while lending Brian a hand teaching more specialized skills. We are looking forward to involving several people in upgrading animal-powered farming in Manica Province. If you are interested in sharing your skills, keep an eye on the website for photos and stories from the Chimoio Learning Center. We will need the help of several skilled farmers and artisans to get good options to the farmers of the area.
Finally, we want to thank Land O’Lakes International for their appreciation of the farmers’ interest in oxen and draft animal practices, and for drawing us into this USDA project. Click to read more about the project on Land O'Lakes' website or to print a flier describing the project.
Check out Dairy Mail Africa, a southern African dairy industry trade magazine, to read an article about Tillers’ international work, www.dairymailafrica.co.za.
Rob Burdick joined Brian Webb in Mozambique for three months ending June 3rd. Brian is heading up Tillers' three and a half year project there with funding from the USDA through Land O'Lakes International's Food for Progress program. Tillers' role in the project includes teaching 5,000 farmers improvements for ox-powered farming or for forage production for their cattle. Rob worked with Brian to establish Tillers as a legal non-governmental organization (NGO) in Mozambique. He also helped establish materials for a training center in Chimoio, Manica Province.
Rob put his knowledge of tools to work as he purchased drills, saws, and vices for the Chimoio Training Center. He found sawyers to supply lumber and local artisans capable of making the wood and metal parts of tools and implements. Working with Brian's new Mozambican training assistant, Cumbane, Rob made a forge and implements including a harrow and sled. He introduced Cumbane to metal working, made seven scythes, and distributed two to workers at the Gouda Gold cheese operation for testing after having trained two of their workers in the scythes' use.
Rob and Cumbane also commenced trainign Holstein/Jersey crossbred calves at Gouda Gold. Rob furnished the training center's guest house and installed the hot water heater, built shelves, etc. He also located and met with potential trainee groups in Zimbe, Catandieh, and Rotanda, and toured projects growing soybeans and wheat.
[Rob] Nestled in the flat valleys between looming bald mountains at the Mozambique-Zimbabwe border were some of the straightest, neatest rows of field corn I have ever seen. That the farm collective was planting, weeding, and harvesting by hand was only evident in the form of women hunched over at the endless task of weeding. Like many operations in Mozambique, an older tractor, often retired from Zimbabwe or South Africa, was available and used for transport, but the fuel and implements must have been too expensive or unreliable to replace hand labor. The scene was common enough that I never thought to ask why the women were working and the tractor resting in the shade.
Mozambicans have waged peace for only nine years following more than twenty years of revolution and civil war. Remains of bombed bridges and roadways lay in heaps next to their replacements, houses as pock-marked and ruined as the roads stand as reminders that rebuilding is still in progress. In the border areas of Manica Provine, many Mozambicans speak English, having been sent to school or to stay with family in then affluent Zimbabwe, while war went on in Manica. Now the economic collapse of Zimbabwe sends surges of highly skilled workers fleeing over the mountains to Mozambique. Between these new arrivals and the existing labor market of skillful and resourceful metal and woodworkers, Manica Province is well poised to begin manufacturing many of the tools which had been either too expensive or unavailable.
Zimplow, based in Harare, Zimbabwe, makes the Mealie brand of animal powered implements. These plows dominate the market in Mozambique, competing favorably with Chinese and Indian imported tools. The Mealie plow is of considerably better quality, in both materials and workmanship, but the design is only slightly better. The regulators on most plows are identical systems with a large set screw that sends more time un-set, except on their ridging plow, which has a nicely cast piece that can be swapped onto their other plows. Most farmers find the old regulators so frustrating that they remove the device altogether and drag the misaligned plow by its beam. With the training center and its equipment, we should be able to make several improvements and, more importantly, teach farmers how to adjust and tune the plows for their needs. Some of the other tools available include a number of harrows and a single row cultivator, but they are all very heavily built with a lot of cast metal and prohibitively expensive, therefore not widely used.
Eating an apple while watching a thirteen-year-old kid turn bedposts on a homemade lathe, his feet holding the tool rest to the dirt, thumb and forefinger serving for calipers, I realized that anything is possible in this country. This kid's turning tool was a reworked file with a skew on one end and a gauge on the other. With no other tools he was creating duplicate legs of a consistency and quality that I would only dream of finding at Lowe's The blacksmiths in the center of Chimoio were making hoes, adzes, and chisels with a small bee-hive furnace burning charcoal and a piece of salvaged railroad track. Again, the skills far exceeded the equipment. Unlike Uganda, many of the welders in town had masks and commercially made welding machines, but skill was still evident in the cleanly bent, cut, and welded section of fencing and burglar bars covering the windows and doors of nicer houses. Even more unlike Uganda, almost any type and size piece of steel adn most power tools are available, as Chimoio sits on the road between Zimbabwe's relatively developed industries and the nearest sea port, Beira.
If there is a place more like the fabled "Big Rock Candy Mountain" potential land of plenty than western Mozambique, no one else has told me about it. Between the availability of materials and skilled artisans, climate variations which allows farmers to grow rice, apples, wheat, and bananas all in one country, and farming practices that can be easily adapted to increase the use of animal power, Manica Province seems to be as promising a location as could be dreamt.
wn of Chimoio. Tillers’ staff members Brian Webb and Rob Burdick flew out of Kalamazoo with bags of tools on March 16th. Brian will stay through the three years of the project. Rob is there for the first three months to help set up a Learning Center for animal power at a local agricultural school.
ers and for artisans. Early on, we should be offering weeding systems for advanced farmers and yoke making for woodworkers and blacksmiths. We will then build up to the skills of cart making and road building. Brian and Rob are setting up an apartment in Chimoio where Rob and other volunteers and staff who follow can stay while lending Brian a hand teaching more specialized skills. We are looking forward to involving several people in upgrading animal-powered farming in Manica Province. If you are interested in sharing your skills, keep an eye on the website for photos and stories from the Chimoio Learning Center. We will need the help of several skilled farmers and artisans to get good options to the farmers of the area.
