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Agricultural faddism
Y
ou wouldn't think that something as staid as agriculture
could suffer from fads, would you? But, by golly, it has,
and continues to do so.
Think back 30 or more years. Macadamia nuts were going to be
the crop that would make farmers into instant millionaires. With
stars in their eyes (and presumably their sums done on the back
of an old envelope stashed firmly in their pockets) farmers went
off and bought at great expense, macadamia saplings, which
their planted in serried rows, fertilized and watered. The only
problem is that a macadamia tree, while it produces a wonderful nut with all sorts of health-giving properties, takes a good
few years before it starts to warrant a harvest. And those good
few years proved too much for many farmers, who either lost
interest, or lost their shirts, as a result.
And so today, if you drive out to the Lowveld, you will come
across fields of macadamia trees, in various stages of overgrownness, the leftovers of shattered dreams of wealth.
When this magazine started 16 years ago, giant garlic growing
was all the rage. It was billed as ideal for a smallholder owing to
the smallness of the plant, the closeness with which it could be
planted to its neighbour and, of course, the high value of the
result.
Half an acre or so under giant garlic was guaranteed to give you
the income to put your son through medical school.
There were two problems, however. First, a small group of
sellers controlled the sale of seed and they, to be sure, made
excellent profits. Secondly, and more seriously, however, once
you had grown the crop (and it required quite a lot of management and infrastructure to get it right), there was no market for
it. Who after all, wants to eat endless quantities of what is in
effect an over-pungent onion, quite unsuited to the more
intense role of traditional garlic, namely flavouring dishes?
Then there's the case of the permaculture movement, originally
the brainchild of an Australian lateral thinker named Bill
Mollison. His seminal books on the subject, written from an
Australian perspective and therefore pretty much directly
applicable to South African conditions, sang the praises of a
small tree which Australians call tagasaste.
By Mollison's reckoning tagasaste is the answer to many a
farmer's prayers. It is hardy, grows fast, makes an excellent
windbreak, and best of all makes a nutritious form of stock feed.
Not many years ago, you will recall, a shrub named tree lucerne
became widely advertised in South Africa as the very apogee of
dryland grazing for cattle, sheep and game alike. It was
advertised as hardy, fast-growing and an excellent windbreak.
Sellers of the seedlings and seed banded together in a close knit
group and held prices of both seedlings and seeds at frankly
usurious prices and it took farmers a little while to cotton on to
the fact that tree lucerne was none other than Australian
tagasaste.
And here's the thing: importing plants (or any other species, for
that matter) wholesale from
another continent is not a good
thing. Look around you:
Blackjack, khakibos, pompom
weed, Mexican poppy, cosmos
and the potato tree from South
America, and wattle from
Australia ~ they haven't exactly
done our environment much
good, have they? Who's to say
that tagasaste will either?
Also in the alien plant class is
the more recent fad for
growing truffles. You buy an
oak sapling whose roots have
been inoculated with truffle
spores. After some years,
because oaks are slow
growing, you let loose a specially trained pig near the tree. The
pig rootles around with its snout and, hopefully, unearths the
valuable little fungus, that resembles in shape, size and colour a
lump of horse turd. This is not an investment for you if you’re
over 50 because by the time the host tree is big enough to have
grown a truffle you’ll either be senile or dead.
But you don’t need to plant an alien to be a faddist. Most
recently, there’s great enthusiasm for the moringa tree.
Proponents of this wondrous, easy-to-grow tree say that every
part is edible and each part has its own unique medicinal
properties (it’s been a while since I enjoyed an envigorating
bowl of wood-pulp and bark...)
The moringa may indeed be wonderful, and truffles are
certainly valuable but the point is clearly that anybody setting
off after the pot of gold at the end of the agricultural rainbow is
surely going to learn the hard way that a fool and his money are
easily parted.
WRITTEN BY SMALLHOLDERS, FOR SMALLHOLDERS