Let's try it out and see how it works

Ueli Scheuermeier

How do ideas happen? How does a farmer who is known for his or her innovations actually proceed? Is it in the same way the scientifically-trained researcher or extensionist has been taught to proceed: analyse the situation, define the problem, decide on the criteria for a good solution, set up a hypothesis for your trials, conduct the trials, analyse the results, check on the hypothesis, make an assessment? When I try to remember the times I have been in close contact with innovating fanners. I start to realize there might be aspects of creativity which we have not yet touched upon with our scientific procedures. What then can we learn from the way fanners go about exploring new ideas? Surely this ought to be highly relevant to the way in which participatory technology development is practised? Let us look, then, into some situations which I have experienced personally

Four anecdotes of innovative farmers

Sprinklers for tomatoes

Gom Bahadur Gaha was sitting in my office asking me whether I could help him get hold of a sprinkler or two. Now where on earth did he get this idea of sprinklers from? I knew him as a small farmer in the hills of Nepal, barely surviving with his family on the marginal and steep land where he has recently settled. Sprinklers were out of the question for him, since they had to be imported, and furthermore you need water pressure, which he was not going to have. This was just too high and costly a technology for his kind of situation, which we had analysed in our project.

Before telling him so I fortunately asked him where he had got the idea. "I have a relative a few hours walk away He is presently watering a sloping field full of tomato plants, and hopes to start selling tomatoes in three weeks time." Tomatoes, now, before the monsoon, on the Butwal market? Sounds like that farmer is going to make money I'm interested and we arrange a trip together to visit this relative of his. Sure enough, the same situation as Gom Bahadur's, only this farmer did not even have a single square foot of terraced and irrigated rice. He was a below-subsistence-level farmer, topping up his income with labour in the rice-fields down on the plains. But there was the sprinkler, tied to a stick which he stuck into different parts of his field every two hours or so. And a simple polythene pipe ran all the way up the hill, crossed two gullies wrapped round a thick wire, and ended finally in a tiny stream running down the mountain, some 300m of pipe in all. I was amazed. We started discussing how he got this all set up. "About 15 sprinklers were handed out to poor families by an NGO programme, but nobody really knew what to do with them", the farmer told me. "I asked my brother who accompanies trucks down to India what he could make out of it, and he showed me the trick with the pipe. Last year I made a small plot with some vegetables, and for the first time we had tomatoes and cucumbers before the rains. So this year I decided to plant this whole field with tomatoes. I know they will be harvested by the time the first rains come, so the field will be ready for the maize. I hope it works out nicely, because I have taken credit from the small-farmers' credit scheme to buy the pipe. If the tomatoes come out right, I'm sure we can sell them in Butwal. It is off-season now, and prices are high. My brother has found a shop in India where similar sprinklers can be had". And that is where Gom Bahadur immediately placed his order for a sprinkler. A year later it turned out that this particular farmer had repaid his credit to the savings scheme, plus the loans he had taken at tremendous costs from money-lenders, and had thereby put his family back into economic independence.

How could we have been so wrong in our assessments of the project? We had invested a lot of effort in analysing the situation of these farmers. We had established that their problem was the vicious circle of poor land, below-subsistence production, lack of cash, and seasonal migration of the men. We had checked this with some of them, and they had agreed. We were searching for solutions, a lot of the efforts going into giving the men opportunities to stay at home. The option of micro-irrigation with polythene pipes had actually also been looked into, but the costs and the risks were considered too high. Here I was with obvious proof of the opposite. Seasonal migration had even possibly been the most important impulse to making it work that brother working as a truck loader.

Ranching with Scottish Highlanders in the Alps

What's this? I had seen Scottish Highland cattle in photographs, but I had never seen these small, long-homed animals with their shaggy long red hair for real, and certainly not in an alpine pasture. Obviously only the bull was pure Scottish, the cows looked like the normal grey cows of the Alps, though a bit smaller, and there were a number of very healthy calves jumping about. But wait a minute, this doesn't look like milk production, does it? Good milking cows are the pride of every alpine farmer, and rightly so. But the farmer who had accompanied us to his herd gently scratched the head of a cow who had come near to him, and laughed at our surprise.

"Well you see", he said, "this makes a lot more sense to us than what we were doing before. My father was a full-time farmer. But when I took over, it was clear that we couldn't make a living from farming alone, since the farm is just too small. So I work outside in a construction firm. My wife also works part-time. You can't keep milking cows that way So we switched to ranching for beef And this here is by far the best combination: Scottish bulls with Tirolean dwarf-cows. They are sturdy, they survive, and the butchers pay nearly double the price than for the meat of normal calves, because the combination seems to make for a very fine-grained meat. We didn't know that at first, but we're glad. We also didn't know that the calves would grow so fast".

But how and where did he get the idea, and how did he develop it? "Well, actually I don't remember any more when exactly the idea cropped up. I just remember we were a few of us in the bar, and one guy said he was either having to stop milking or stop farming altogether. We all of us laughed and said we would rather stop farming altogether than be a farmer with no milking cows, because farmers with sheep just simply aren't farmers, are the? Anyway, somehow, somebody set up a joke about having Scottish Highlanders. This joke kept circulating in a few heads until one day a neighbour came along with a magazine article about these cattle. I was intrigued, and we wrote to the author. We also asked the extension service, but they said they knew nothing about these cattle. Anyway, the idea slowly evolved. At first we thought to cross them with our big brown cattle and see what happened. But then another neighbour had the idea of trying it with the disappearing breed of Tiroleans. Nobody liked them any more because of their small size, and their consequent lower milk-producing capacity But they are highly adapted to our mountains, and somewhat sturdier. We formed a group, and got past the tremendous administrative hassle to get a bull or two, and started breeding just to see whether this joke would work out, though for some of us it no longer looked like a joke. When we saw how enthusiastic the butcher became about the cross-bred calves, my wife started asking why we didn't quit milking and have a herd of Tirolean cows and a Scottish bull? It was only then that I started to consider the proposition seriously So now we're on our way The research station has started to show an interest and we're setting up a research programme with them to see whether we should go for developing our own breed or whether we should try to exploit the heterosis effect in the calves. And the extensionists have started to get interested in the economics of it. But I can already tell you ...", and with a final pat on the head of the Tirolean cow he had scratched, he added: "I would never go back to milking unless of course I had a bigger farm, or maybe not even then".

Giant mulberries made small

Manbir Rana was showing me his fruit-tree nursery which he had built up with the aid of the project in Nepal. For two years now he had been running it on his own, having been trained in grafting techniques of citrus and apple. His nursery was fine, and he had started to sell independently of the project to the surrounding villages; it had already become known that the plants from Manbir usually did not die off; providing, of course, no goat got near them. Suddenly, I saw young grafted plants which looked like mulberry, but obviously couldn't be, because mulberries are propagated by cuttings and not grafted. What was this?

"Ah well", he explained, "I'm just doing a little trial. I'm trying to find out whether it is possible to graft the big jungle mulberry onto the normal mulberry. You see I did four with tongue-grafting, four with lip-grafting, four with bud-grafting, and four or five others in various ways. Tongue-grafting seems to work best".

"But why?", I asked. "What's the use of this, and what is 'jungle-mulberry'?" "I'll show you", he said. Off we went into the high forest, where Manbir showed me a huge tree; sure enough, lying around under the tree were the remains of very large mulberry fruits. It seemed the monkeys had been through the tree-tops. "You see, this type of tree bears very big fruits very similar to the mulberries we have around our fields for fodder purposes. The fruits are very sweet, and the kids know each and every tree and come together to pick up the fallen fruits from the ground. Unfortunately, the tree grows so tall, it is very difficult to reach the fruit up there. Watching the kids I suddenly had an idea. I climbed up and got myself a branch and then grafted it onto the small mulberry, which never grows tall even if you never cut it for fodder. I'm trying to see whether it might be possible in this way to have a smaller tree with those same big sweet fruits. We shall see. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. If it works, I have absolutely no doubt about the interest in the villages for planting such grafted trees. You should come here when the kids try to bring down fruit by throwing stones!"

Home-made rower-pump

I was rowing a rower-pump and I couldn't believe my eyes. Water was coming out of a well about six metres deep with a fairly decent splash, and away it trickled to some vegetable plots nearby The farmer was grinning in delight, and his kids ran around squirting the water from the discharge pipe, even his wife interrupted her weaving to come and have a look at this outsider who wouldn't believe they had a working rower-pump. Well, well, well, I knew exactly what a rower-pump was and how it worked. And some time back, I had actually had the idea to somehow get hold of rower-pumps because they could make a big impact on the income of many poor households on the river plain, which had no irrigation water. However, the engineers in the technical training centre in the capital had all told me that the pumps had to be imported because certain vital parts could not be produced in the country. So I forgot about them, and frankly didn't believe the people who had come to tell me there were rower-pumps working in the neighbouring district. But here I was, with a rower-pump produced in the village itself: and I myself was rowing it.

The manager of the local branch of the Agricultural Bank had been told the same thing by the engineers. Soon after having arrived at his new post, he had made a tour through the store of the bank, and had found a machine nobody understood, but which was said to be an imported pump. He found a clever farmer who said he would like to find out how it worked. Unfortunately I could not meet this farmer, so the bank manager explained what happened next. After a few weeks he went to see the farmer, who was pumping water. The bank manager immediately saw the potential this could have, and asked at headquarters where more such pumps could be found. "Sorry", was the reply "They have to be imported and cannot be produced in the country" He did not give up, but went to the farmer and asked him if he could copy the machine. Well, he would try "I then found some funds to buy materials that the farmer needed for copying the machine. We both agreed they had to be readily available materials, without having to bother headquarters for supplies. So he went to work He replaced the steel pipes with polythene pipes, which took several attempts to figure out. Some parts in the valves he simply cut in hard wood instead of cast iron which wasn't available. The biggest headache proved to be the surge-chamber, but eventually it turned out that we could even replace the steel with an earthen pot stuck on top of the pipe, with a wet cloth as a seal. So now he's produced somewhere around 20 such pumps in the last year, which we immediately financed through credit for small farmers out on the plain. It has turned out to be a very good investment. The credits are all being paid back, and these people are making a decent cash-income for the first time in their Lives selling vegetables in the local market."

Well, I had something to say to those engineers who had told me they couldn't produce rower-pumps cheap enough because they needed imported cast-iron parts. They too were surprised, and after my explanation of how these adapted pumps were constructed, they insisted that this kind of model would definitely have up to 30% less efficiency "So what", I replied, "that information is absolutely irrelevant for the actual workings of the system out there in the plains, with the delighted farmer and his splashing kids."

What triggers the innovative process?

Innovative processes are triggered by trying out new things and not by analysing the situation. Before starting to try out something, did any of these farmers analyse their situation rationally? They certainly knew about their situation, but did they consciously and fully analyse it before doing something? I don't think so. I believe it is much more helpful to assume that the expertise farmers have about the system they are living in is largely of an intuitive nature. In other words, they never need to analyse filly their system, and do not work with the notion of system in the sense in which the scientist uses the term. But they constantly assess chances and ideas against the backdrop of their intuitive understanding of their own situation. By intuitive I mean that it is much more helpful to ask "what would happen if this or that thing were possible", than to ask "tell us how you make a living". This is situational knowledge as I understand it; that is, only when I imagine a particular situation, can I start to understand what changes this imagined situation would make to the circumstances in which I am living. A precise question or a precise challenge, an interesting piece of new information, or a precisely defined supposed chance triggers the knowledge about the probable interactions with all the relevant variables in the system.

On the other hand, a 'let's fully understand this system first before we suggest any sort of action' approach, tends to draw a blank Of course, in retrospect, the villagers will always be able to point out clearly the workings of the situation which led them to take a certain course of action. Their explanations usually make a lot of rational sense. The alpine farmer, in particular, could point out very neatly the systemic reasons why he is ranching now This seems, however, to be a rationality emerging only after the fact. When I ask "How did the idea of doing it in this new way actually develop?", the process no longer appears to be so analytically straightforward.