Show Me Your Magician!

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.

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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.  

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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.

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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 10,000^th Burkina Faso digester.  It will certainly be worth celebrating and I’m already looking forward to the return.