What
would make someone invest double the average annual income of a farmer on a biodigester?
I’ve decided to go to Burkina Faso to
try and see why Burkinabe farmers are doing this at the rate of hundreds of
biodigesters every year.
I’m
in Burkina Faso with Sally, our communications officer. We’re visiting Burkina
Faso during Harmatan, and what passes for its cool season. It’s 40°C in the
shade right after lunch which cools off to a more tolerable 27°C at
around the 9 pm mark. A Nairobi woman
born and bred, this is on the wrong side of the edge of extreme weather for me.
It’s reminiscent of the solar equinox that Nairobians barely survived a few months
ago, and that will soon pass into folklore I’m convinced. Children will hear
tales of the Equinox, when Kimbo and Vaseline were liquid, and water ran hot
from taps. But meanwhile in Ouagadougou,
people are congratulating us on picking the right time to visit as it is cool
and ‘aimable’.
In
Ouagadougou, we are ensconced in the Splendid Hotel which thankfully has
air-conditioning that they don’t stint on and is running on full blast. The
hotel has signs stating that it is still under reconstruction. At the beginning of the year, Islamists
thought to be from neighbouring Mali barricaded the hotel and took the mostly
foreign guests hostage. They were finally freed by commando troops from BF and
France but unfortunately 30 people died in the incident. The hotel has just
re-opened but the neighbouring Cappuchino Restaurant that our Finance Manger recommends
highly is still barricaded and awaiting fixing or demolishing.
****
We
are in Mali to meet with our partners, the Programme National de Biodigesteur du Burkina Faso (PNB-BF) that our Africa Biogas Partnership Programme (ABPP) has been working with for over 7 years. Initially, ABPP started off as a renewable
energy programme that sought to provide cattle owners with an alternative form
of energy from cow dung. A farmer with a
biodigester collects the dung daily, adds water to it and feeds it into the biodigester.
The decomposition of the dung produces methane, a biogas that is piped to
nearby kitchens for cooking. In Burkina,
the PNB programme has saved women and children over two thousand years (not a
typo) in workload reduction where they no longer walk miles over an average of
4 hours daily to collect firewood. It
has also immeasurably improved health outcomes because unlike firewood or dung,
biogas burns cleanly without the attendant lung destroying smoke. Indoor
pollution caused by inhaling firewood smoke experts say is akin to smoking a
staggering 40 cigarettes a day. The WHO estimates that about 7 million die
prematurely due to this indoor pollution. To put it in context, cooking with
firewood is more dangerous for women and children’s health than malaria and HIV/AIDS
combined.
In
addition to the biogas, every ten days or so, an odourless brown slurry trickles out of the biodigesters. This watery sludge is the by-product of the cow dung
the farmers fed into the digester after the bacteria have produced the methane.
As it happens, this bio-slurry is an extremely potent nutrient rich cocktail and
is why farmers are doing all they can to get a biodigesters. This slurry is a potent cocktail of nutrients
that provides almost perfect nutrition for the soils. Mixed with silage, it also
acts as a natural pest and weed controller and in farm after farm, farmers
report doubling, tripling and in some instances quadrupling their yield. They
tell stories of how in the first year alone, they reduced to almost nothing,
their annual purchase of chemical fertiliser. In places like Burkina Faso where
rain falls once a year during the annual rainy season in October, the
application of the compost from the slurry mixed with farm ‘refuse’ (stalks and
stem from the harvested grains) allows the soils to retain the extremely
valuable moisture that gives plants that extra edge they need to grow in the
face of a baking sun. Farmers speak of
how this organic compost has improved the composition of their soils and the
improved soil texture and made it easier for plants to grow where none could
before.
We
travel to Koupela to see an example of these restored soils. There we meet
Sylvian who the PNB team introduce as an ‘agro-buinessman’. He’s a larger than
life man who’s constantly on the move. He stops to pick agricultural tools out
of the way, call out instructions in Moore to farm hands, and we converse in a
mixture of extremely broken French from me, and charmingly halting English from
him that produces delightful phrases like “...my cows, they are African. But.
Also they are European” (a turn of phrase that puts to shame my utilitarian
contribution of “hybrid cows”). In any
case, we’re fluent enough for mutual understanding. Sylvian explains that he bought
this parcel of land last year from a couple who had been working it for over 30
years. After three decades, convinced that the land was spent, and had nothing
more to give, they decided to sell the land. While the couple who sold him the
land was happy to find a buyer, they were also concerned when they heard his
plans to grow all sorts of crop on the land. They told him point blank that he could
not do it. "Ce n'est pas possible! C'est impossible!". They knew the land
intimately. They’d worked it for decades. They’d done everything they could and
that the land was depleted. Despite their concern and caution, Sylvian insisted
he still wanted to buy the land. Tut tutting, they sold it to him and cautioned
him on the inevitable heartbreak.
Sylvian
however stuck to his guns, convinced that he could make this work for him
through the application of bio-slurry. He takes us to the pit where his compost
is still curing and he gives me some to smell. Confirmed pluviophile,
this is a happy smell for me. It conjures up the smell of fresh
rain- especially the first rain of the wet season when everything becomes
clean, and wet and new. It’s the smell of Karura forest in October at bright
o’clock in the morning. It is the smell of fertile and fecund lands. They are
soils that give abundantly, but equally true, are also soils that are given
back with as generous a measure through the constant return to the earth of
plant and animal materials. The Burkina soil has no smell really. It’s devoid
of organic matter, Jan the preternaturally upbeat SNV biogas advisor remarks.
It’s what makes it porous and haemorrhages precious nutrients every time is
rains. It also doesn’t retain water much and it’s just plain hard for things to
grow in it. To me, the relative paucity of the harvest is less remarkable to me
than that anything actually can grow
here. Sylvian was however confident that rain permitting, an application of bio
slurry would translate to rows and rows of crops.
The
couple was in the area recently, and they stopped by their old place. When they
saw what Sylvian’s farm looked like, they told him : “Show us your magician!
Show us he that’s allowed you to do all this!” Sylvian laughs as he tells this story but I am
slightly misty eyed. While the science
can explain exactly why plant yields increased, I feel like I am witness to
something special. This bringing back to life soils that were dead is
no less special for being explainable.
Sylvian continues explaining how he showed them the ‘magic’. He took
them to the slurry pit, and showed them the compost. He also gifted them with a
small truckload of organic manure that he instructed them to use on their land,
and report to him on their progress. They’ve since been back asking for more
compost, but Sylvian doesn’t have enough for his own land as it is. He has
grand plans for his place you see. He speaks to me of organic sorghum fields that
he’ll plant as food for the extra cows he’s getting. He points to two technicians dressed in blue
overalls that are currently installing a drip irrigation system. He wants to
have two growing seasons a year. He also wants to grow onions, and peppers,
cucumbers and ‘poivron’. Our combined Franglish is insufficient to translate poivron, but once I’m back in the hotel,
Google translates yields pepper. When I ask him to quantify the difference the
biodigester has made, he tells me that what the composting has done to his
fields is immeasurable and the best thing he could have done for his farm.
Don’t get him wrong, the biogas is great for him too. His employees now cook
with this as opposed to cutting down his trees which made him very unhappy.
He’s also happy that the gas has eased their fuel collecting chores. But ultimately
for him, it’s the difference to the soils that the compost has made that he’s
happiest about, and that he’d invest in all over again at double the cost.
****
In
2015, President Kaboré was elected in with an election promise to build 40,000
bio-digesters in Burkina Faso. It’s an astonishing figure. To put it in
context, the Africa Biogas Programme has a target of 100,000 biodigesters to
build in five countries over a period of about 8 years. In an early morning meeting with the Minister
of Livestock, he states that his Ministry in conjunction with other involved
line Ministries are without a doubt going to build the plants. Burkina Faso is
one the victims of global climate change, where the rainy seasons are getting shorter
and more erratic, and the inexorable creep of the Sahel into what was once
farmland is an unfortunate and lived reality. The biodigesters are a tool in
Burkina’s climate adaptation arsenal. The Minister tells me that he also sees
this as a way of improving livestock management & food security. It’s a
plan that has he says has the ‘highest level commitment from the Government’.
It’s easy to be cynical about that phrase, but Xavier, the indefatigable head
of the PNB is quick to remind everyone that the Government currently subsidises
the construction of every biogas plant at the rate of $225 per plant.
No
one in the room underestimates the herculean nature of this task. The biogas
plant construction process in Burkina is notorious in the African biogas sector
for its legendary difficulty. In East Africa, digging the pit for a
bio-digester takes 2 people with shovels & a jembe about 1-2 days. In Burkina Faso, digging the pit requires ten
to fifteen strong men armed with pick axes acting in turns. It can take from
ten days to one month to dig the pit. Digging the pit reminds me of watching
people dig up those infernal termite hills that every so often sprung up in the
farms on the outskirts of Thika. Every so often, there was a trail of sparks
when the jembes struck a particularly hard part of the termite hill. Wielded badly, the wrong angle of the jembe
or pick axe could -and unfortunately did leave lasting injuries.
Now imagine digging up a concrete like termite hill in 45°C weather. Constructing a digester is hellish in the dry season where even evening temperatures bring little respite and the soils are hard baked by the sun. The farmer also has to come up with about $300 that the Government subsidy doesn’t cover to pay for the plant. It is a plan that by all accounts should have a snowballs’ chance in hell of success. And yet, Xavier, the PNB Coordinator is fully confident that this will happen. He speaks in a very matter of fact way about how they’ll get these numbers. While he is all too aware of the difficulties, he’s however seen and interacted with too many farmers to know that these digesters are irresistible and invaluable to the farmers of Burkina. He took on what was initially seen as a quixotic task even to his wife, but has been able to create this programme through a lot of persuasion and sheer force of will.
****
It’s
the last day of our trip. Yesterday, we visited the last biogas plants of our
trip. These ones took us to Leo, a few kilometres away from the border of
Burkina Faso and Ghana. We visited the village of Metio, that’s brimming with
old world charm and women in brightly coloured frocks. We’re welcomed by the
residents of the village with baobab water. It a chalky looking liquid that is
served in large green mugs. The baobab water is sweet and cool and has a
vaguely nutty taste. We meet the owners of the household and they repeat just
how important the compost has been to them. The owner of the household we’re
visiting self financed the construction of his biodigester after he saw what his
neighbour had been able to do with his farm after he started composting with
bioslurry. Through this word of mouth, the tiny village currently has 8
bio-digesters and are planning to build 15 more. They show us the rest of the digesters and
feed us a delicious lunch of couscous, chicken and some green vegetables that
are slightly bitter to the taste and that I’m told are a super-food. We down
the lunch with baobab water, and head back to Ouagadogou with a pit stop by the
Nununa Shea butter factory to see how they’re extracting shea butter from the
shea butter nuts, and their plans for an industrial sized bio-digester. Jan and
Gladys from PNB have been experimenting on ways to see how they can use the
byproducts from the shea butter extracting process to fuel the bio-digesters.
If successful, this would put the Nununa Factory really close to zero waste
manufacturing. It’s exciting stuff to see just how invested the team is in
making the technology as accessible as possible to the Burkinabe.
In the evening, the team takes us out for a farewell dinner, and it feels like we’re now amongst old friends. Tomorrow morning we’ll fly back to Nairobi via Addis and I’m looking forward to coming back in April next year to celebrate the commissioning of the 10,000th Burkina Faso digester. It will certainly be worth celebrating and I’m already looking forward to the return.
