Bridging solutions to similar farm challenges

By Stephanie Sorensen

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Prairie Grains is the official publication of
the Minnesota
Association of
Wheat Growers,
North Dakota Grain Growers Association,
South Dakota Wheat, Inc., and the Minnesota Barley Growers Association.

The meeting wasn’t with farmers in a main street cafe in the Northern Plains. It was in Senegal, West Africa.

Lemme says he was struck by the similarity of his conversations with farmers in West Africa, and those that are taking place among Northern Plains farmers.

That similarity hasn’t been lost on government and academic leaders in Senegal and the University of Minnesota. Lemme and other members of the U of M faculty were in Senegal to learn about their agriculture, and help develop a loan proposal that would bring about a partnership between the University and Senegal.

Students who have studied agriculture at the University of Senegal will have the chance to come to St. Paul and work with U of M faculty while earning master’s degrees. They will help U of M researchers find solutions to problems in the Northern Plains, such as scab. In exchange, they will be learning techniques they can apply to their future research as scientists and agricultural experts in Senegal.

Senegal is located in West Africa, bordering the Atlantic Ocean, and has about nine million residents. Four million of those residents live in Dakar, the capitol–a city whose population has doubled in the last decade due to the influx of farmers and other villagers seeking a living wage. What they’ve found are low-paying jobs and an infrastructure that can’t handle their numbers.

University of Minnesota faculty and Senegalese farmers in a community packing house with samples of melons and green peppers ready for exporting to the European market.

Hence this proposal, the brain child of Moussa Seck, a Senegalese man who earned a master’s degree at the U of M in the early 1970s. At that time, the University was conducting a similar exchange project with Morocco, in North Africa. Seck, now a key leader at a U.N.-affiliated organization in Senegal, Enda/Syspro, initiated a partnership between Senegal and the University. Uof M President Mark Yudof and Senegal political officials backed the proposal, and signed an agreement last year.

But while visiting Senegal, Lemme was fascinated by a pilot program established by its government half a decade ago to meet agricultural challenges, many of which mirror those in the Northern Plains. The successful project has resulted in a water supply to irrigate rural farms, and newly-established grower marketing groups. With the additional World Bank loan, Senegal would also be able to attack infrastructure problems, and bring electricity to farms, improve rural roads and build schools.

Dr. Cindy Tong (left) of the University of minnesota's Horticultural Science department discusses post-harvest management of melons and peppers with Senegalese farmers.

The country would also be able to expand the most innovative aspect of the pilot project: A free, six-month training program to teach farmers, or villagers who want to become farmers, how to make farming more profitable. Students learn how to employ drip irrigation so they can switch from their current, low-value dryland crops of peanut and millet, to irrigated, high-value crops like green beans, strawberries, melons and asparagus.

Upon graduation from the program, students spend six months working for a farmer, also a program graduate. This way, student interns get to decide from hands-on experience whether they want to invest in their own farms. And in exchange for the free training, graduating students who decide to become farmers agree to hire a student for six months sometime in the future.

The hope of these centers, of which twenty more would be built if the World Bank loan goes through, is to enable young people to return to their villages and establish profitable farms.

Some graduates of the training program have also formed value-added-style co-ops, like those established by growers in the Northern Plains. The Senegal versions are much less formal, says Lemme, but succeed in providing a consistent crop supply to customers, and resulting in higher take-home profit by eliminating a middle man.

The farmers gather to package their crop under a group brand, such as yellow melons labeled "Senegold." One enterprising young farmer has even formed a business alliance with a French company, and is using equipment shipped by them to vacuum-pack and bar code his crop. And in a group marketing decision, the farmers decided not to invest the little capital they have in pesticides, but to market their crop in the lucrative European organic market.

Lemme says there’s a great deal of information that could be exchanged if Northern Plains and Senegal producers were to meet. He thinks farmers in Senegal could profit from seeing active resource committees that unite corporate, academic and grower groups, like the Small Grains Research and Education Committee on which he serves. The Committee, involving different sectors of the wheat industry, was formed by the Minnesota Wheat Research and Promotion Council to advise and prioritize wheat research projects funded by the state’s one-cent per bushel wheat checkoff.

He also thinks that, by seeing value-added ventures here, Senegal farmers could take their own co-ops to the next level.

In turn, Northern Plains farmers can look at how Senegal has structured its training and applied research activities, including the internship program and grower marketing groups.

A lot of peer teaching goes on in Senegal, Lemme says. Farmers teach other farmers in their village what they learned in the training program. With farms just about five acres apart, Senegal farmers work closely with one another and this kind of exchange is natural, Lemme says.

But they also make a point to meet each week to discuss production problems and predict how much they expect to bring to the value-added central packing house the following week. The Northern Plains version of this might exist in the form of field days and seminars, but these are more formal and less frequent. Marketing clubs here might come close, but many farmers do not participate and if they do, the focus is mostly grain marketing.

Still, farmers on both sides of the Atlantic are facing similar challenges and seeking innovative, feasible solutions. "Rural people are taking charge of their own destiny. They know they have to change the way they farm and the crops they grow to be profitable," says Lemme.

University of Minnesota faculty and Senegalese farmers examine a drip-irrigated melon field. Corn is grown around the outside of the melon field to attract insects away from the melons. Legume trees are grown around the outside of the field to reduce winds and fix nitrogen. Branches are annually cut and fed to cattle.