Source: The Waggle – Issue 63
The Man Who Stopped The Desert – On December 3rd, 2023, regenerative farming icon Yacouba Sawadogo died in a hospital in Burkina Faso at age 77. In 2018, he won the Right Livelihood Award – sometimes called the ‘Alternate Nobel Prize’ – for his lifelong dedication to turning barren land into a forest, demonstrating how farmers can regenerate their soil with innovative use of Indigenous and local knowledge. When Sawadego began his work in the middle of a 1980 drought, he was ridiculed for his belief that he could grow trees using a traditional water conservation technique called zai, which involved digging small pits in the soil. Sawadego innovated the practice by digging the pits at different times of the year and filling them with compost and termites, which nurtured saplings and millet, an African staple crop. His quest was deemed quixotic because desertification was on the move in the Sahel, boosted by land-degrading agriculture and climate change. But Sawadogo stopped the desert. He successfully restored a 40-hectare forest containing more than sixty species of trees that is now considered one of the most diverse parcels of land in the entire region. Sawadego’s work is an example of adapting traditional knowledge to solve modern challenges. Other examples include Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR), a practice in Africa that nurtures trees to grow from former stumps, silvopasture, forest farming, and other types of agroecology. Ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan details a variety of traditional practices for drylands in his book Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land. You can see videos of agroecology here. See the Agroforestry Nexus and Agroecology Nexus for more information.
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