Network of Earthkeeping Christian Communities in South Africa

NECCSA Update: October / November 2007

A monthly newsletter on Church and Environment in South Africa

1. Traditional Foods Workshop

Tuesday 16 October was World Food Day.  The Anglican Diocese of Natal Environment Committee arranged a workshop on traditional foods in collaboration with Diakonia Council of Churches and the Durban Botanic Gardens.  Held on Saturday 20 October at the Botanic Gardens Education Centre it attracted about 120 people. The proceedings were opened by Bishop Rubin Phillip who spoke about the importance of food in the light of world wide hunger and poverty.  He emphasized the link between food production and culture, climate change and agriculture and the value of food in our religious traditions.   Further presentations looked at some traditional foods, examples of permaculture and the dangers of genetically modified food.  There were a number of different stalls to view, including one on medicinal plants. The morning concluded with some sampling of traditional food.

(Contributed by Andrew Warmback)

2. Wilderness Challenge

This year the Anglican Parish of the Drakensberg celebrated the 50th anniversary of the completion and consecration of the stone church of St Michael and all Angels, Himeville.  As part of the celebrations  a wilderness walk was arranged for 24/25 September.  It was a 13km walk from Sani to Cobham, where we stayed overnight. The parish, which extends into this area of the Ukhahlama-Drakensberg is part of the World Heritage site of this area.  The weather for walking was cool and the company enjoyable.  About 12 men, including some fathers and sons, participated.  A great way to celebrate the church's anniversary and gain a greater appreciation of the wilderness. The vision for this walk was that men participate; hopefully another one will be planned with all participating.

(Contributed by Andrew Warmback)

3. Obituary - Ian Frederick Garland

I first met Ian Garland in 1958 at the inaugural meeting of the Zululand Branch of the Wildlife Society of South Africa held in Empangeni.  Since that time we enjoyed a long and close friendship.  Ian owned a fascinating farm at Mtunzini called "Twinstreams", which from 1946 had been the venue of the first WESSA environmental education courses for school children.  During several decades Ian was responsible for planting over 80,000 trees to create the wonderful Twinstreams forest that we see today.  He sold the farm in 1987.  At a later stage dedicated areas of "Twinstreams" known as "Mick's Park" and "Sinkwe Centre" were set aside by Mondi (the new owners of "Twinstreams") as a permanent Environmental Education Centre run by WESSA.

His life-long work of changing the attitudes of people away from material wealth to an appreciation of God and His natural work will never be forgotten.  WESSA [has] lost one of its finest members and a stalwart conservationist in every respect.  To his wife and family we express our heartfelt sympathy.

 

SALAKAHLE NOMUZANE

(Contributed by Keith H. Cooper  - Taken from WESSA KZN News, Oct/Nov/Dec 2007 – Volume 48 No 4.)

 

(Additional comments by Pierre Naudé): 

I first met Ian when he worshipped in the Congregation that I was pastoring in Kloof in the 1990's.  He had bought a house on the edge of the Kloof Gorge and there was about an acre of vacant land between the house and the road.   Within a very short time he had this planted with indigenous trees and, due to his unusual planting method, in less than the normally expected time there will be a new little patch of `Natural Forest' in Kloof!   

 

Ian's "unusual planting method" was to plant trees far more densely than they would normally be planted in a garden or plantation – this means that they rush upwards in the competition for light and, in perhaps half the time that one would normally expect, very quickly create a mature forest.  

I am now using this method to begin some test plots for a reforestation programme on the Lovweld in areas around `rural villages' where there is no longer any firewood.  (Research in the area has shown that each household in these `villages' – in places as many as 1000 homes per `village' – uses between three and five tons of firewood per year, all cropped from the surrounding veld ... and nobody is replanting anything!)  Perhaps a legacy of Ian's insight will be the halting and even turning around of the destruction of the `bush' on the Lowveld! 

4. Farming God's Way – bringing Food Security to rural households on the Lowveld.

Hoedspruit – It took Ds August Basson, from Lesotho, to come to the heart of South Africa's agricultural community to teach us how to farm -  God's way ...  Well, it may sound all airy-fairy, but if you think of it:

-                     Why is virgin soil better than tilled soil?

-                     How long has nature been growing plants on that land – yet it remains eroded and fertile?

-                     Why de WE turn the soil upside down when it doesn't happen in nature?  

-                     Why do we remove all the natural mulch?

 

Well, the answers were discovered by Brian Oldrieve, a Zimbabwean farmer who was on the verge of bankruptcy when, he says, "God told me to go into the environment and see how he farms".  This he did, and through the methods that he subsequently discovered and developed he managed to double the record commercial maize yield in Zimbabwe at a fraction of the cost or disturbance to the soil.

This technique is today known as No-Till or Conservation Agriculture.  It is a way of farming with nature, not against it.  It produces good yields on soils that are easily eroded   or that farmers thought could produce nothing.  It prevents erosion and improves the soil, so harvests get better year after year.   The three easy principles of Conservation Agriculture are:

1.                 Disturb the soil as little as possible – the less you disturb it the better it can function.

2.             Keep the soil covered as much as possible – mulching prevents evaporation of moisture, keeps the roots cool and stops

                erosion.  It also composts the soil and serves to rebuild it.

3.                 Mix and rotate crops – this will decrease weeds and pests and help to keep disease at bay. 

 

Kruger2Canyon will be keeping a close eye on the sample plot prepared by a group of learners  last week.  At first site the plot looks hard, the soil seems compacted and impenetrable and the prospects of success seem dismal ...  

 

August assures me that we will be amazed.  He says that when he arrived in Lesotho he had 20 to 40 people begging for food from him every day.  Today, everyone in the villages near him has ample food and one small village even sold 6 tons of maize to the World Food Organisation this year.  He also told Kruger2Canyon that Brian Oldrieve has planted crops using this method on old parking lots and it has worked 100%.

(Reported by Heidi Lee Smith in Kruger2Canyon Newspaper, Friday 26 October 07)

(Additional comments by Pierre Naudé): 

I first met August in Kenya last year when we were attending the 2nd World Conference on God and Creation.  I attended a workshop that he lead and was very impressed by the pictures he showed comparing rural farmers following the traditional method of slash and burn, plough, etc with farmers who had changed to the Biblical Agriculture method.  I was even more impressed to hear from a number of rural farmers in Kenya and Tanzania that they had attended his training courses and were having dramatically better yields for far less cost.   The input costs were halved and the yield was twice, even three and four times what they cropped before. 

 

There is a huge rural population in the central Lowveld area and I have been very aware of the abject poverty of many.   Add to this vast unemployment, the second highest HIV figures in the world (after KwaZulu Natal), the worsening influence of global warming on food security, etc and you will realise that this is an area of great need.  Most of the  families here live below the UN poverty line.  

On an environmental level, I have been disturbed for some time about the huge impact made by local communities on the physical environment - cropping the veld for wood, food, etc.  Recent studies by the Wits University Rural Facility (situated in this area) have shown that, where families have lost a breadwinner to HIV-AIDS they are no longer able to afford to hire a plough to plough their field outside the village and are reduced to a few rows of land in their small back yard.  Their dependence on the veld becomes even greater and their food security becomes critical.

To my mind, something that worked in both the cold / wet of Lesotho and the hot / dry of East Africa should also work on the Lowveld.  If it meant that hungry people could cultivate their land without the cost of hiring ploughs and begin to feed themselves and others, while at the same time improving the condition of the land and reducing dependence on the `veld', then it seemed like a very good option.  I invited August to come to the Lowveld to present two training courses. 

The first course (reported on above by Kruger2Canyon) took place on a large commercial farm at a food garden for a big AIDS care project.  Local Farmers and Schools allowed their workers to attend for two days (on full pay) so that they could learn this new method farming.    While the course was aimed at rural people and (initially) small scale agriculture, it was interesting to arrive on the second day of the course to find the Farm Manager already putting mulch onto his fields!  His comment: "I have always known the benefit of mulch, I use it in my own garden, I have just never realised that I could put in in my fields!"

The second course was conducted at an AIDS centre near the Orpen Gate of the Kruger National Park.  30 people were invited, over 100 attended!   The level of excitement was huge as people who had seen their lands progressively getting poorer and yielding less and less crops heard from two farmers from Lesotho who accompanied August how the lives of their whole villages had been turned around.   

Apart from the immediate benefits of people being trained in new skills, new plots being developed and planted during the workshops (and the food being available to the two AIDS projects) we also have conducted this as a test project to confirm the suitability of the method for this area.   Subject to the results (which I have no doubt will be positive) the project will be multiplied many times during the course of next year.  

Valley Methodist Church in Pretoria and Trinity Methodist Church in Linden, Johannesburg, provided the finding for the training. The staff of Westfalia farms and the members of the Hoedspruit Community Church helped in innumerable ways.

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 Distributed by EM Conradie 7/11/2007