ethiopia – the farms
The farms are everywhere in Ethiopia. The mountainsides are steep and rocky, but Ethiopians have built amazing terraces with those rocks and they are planting everywhere. The main crops are grains including barley, wheat, maize and sorghum, but the biggest crop of all is tef. Tef is an endemic grain that looks like short wheat although each grain is about the size of a pinhead. I do not believe tef is grown anywhere else and I understand most of the other grains have been modified over time to especially work in the difficult conditions of Ethiopia where only about two months of rain falls starting in July and the altitudes are very high. Ethiopian farming is truly a wonder of human survival.
I was touring in the middle of harvest. Ethiopians for the most part harvest all of their grains using small handknives on their hands and knees. Millions of people are in the fields doing this. Most of the farming is so primitive that it felt like I had gone in a time machine back 150 or more years. They pile the grain stalks in big stacks. Cornstacks, haystacks, tef stacks, and the rest decorated the landscape. After they are collected they then they thresh the stalks to separate the grains from the chaff using one of two methods. The “modern” method is to create a circle in the field with a hard floor of compressed dung. They pile some of the grain stalks and then walk oxen in continuous circles on the stalks. Meanwhile, someone keeps turning the walked over stalks using their pitchforks made from tree limbs. This crushes the stalks and the individual grains come loose. After a while, they remove the stalks and then scoop up the pile of grain. Then they repeat the process. Another method involves people beating the stalks manually. It makes me ill thinking about how much work these people perform in order to get a handful of grain.
Ethiopia has a lot of water, but it is not necessarily near the farms especially since the majority of them are on mountainsides. Ethiopia is working on irrigation projects, but it appears to me that they will always have difficult situations on most of these farms. Crop failures are a real possibility every year for most of these farmers.
In the south where there is less mountains and warmer, more humid conditions, the plantings are more diverse. Bananas, mangos, and the rest of the tropical fruits are common. They can’t grow these like they can in Uganda, but it does provide the country with more than just grains. I did see some of the famed coffee plantings, but I was not in the part of the country that has made this crop so famous. Coffee was originally from Ethiopia and this is where the figured out how to roast a bean and create a drink from it.
Not far from Addis Ababa going south, I saw three tractors. There are some large corporate farms in this area who apparently have enough size and money to warrant joining the 20th Century. I also saw two small machines used to separate the grain although I never saw anything sophisticated as the combine harvesters used on the modern world farms.
For planting the fields, it is almost all done manually except Ethiopians do plow. Other than the few rich farms with tractors, plowing involves two oxen in a wooden yoke pulling a wooden plow which a man is holding behind the oxen. Straight out of the 1800s! Most of the plows I saw didn’t even have a metal tip. The plows were basically a large tree limb with a gizmo on one end to connect to the wooden yoke and another limb perpindicular to it for the farmer to hold on one end while the other digs into the ground. Sometimes that perpindicular limb for digging has a handle… sometimes not. When I was watching the pilgrims in the St Mary of Zion church grounds in Axum, a man dragged a large wood object through the crowd. I thought he was dragging a cross like Christ, but then I saw that it was just a plow. I do not know why he brought his plow to the pilgrimage. Chalk it up to one of the many mysteries of this country that I can never understand 🙂
Tags: Africa, ethiopia, Travel
vagabondrick
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