By Stan Schwartz
Eric Dolbeare said the help local farmers provided to small farmers in Zambia has grown over the six years the project has been in operation.
Dolbear, who is with one of the Rotary Club in Illinois, has worked with Zambia farmers in sub-Sahara Africa. He brought this project to the attention of the Louisiana Rotary Club and then the Bowling Green Rotary Club, to help make these subsistence farmers more sustainable in their corn-growing efforts.
He and his fellow Rotarians from Illinois started traveling to Zambia in 2018 but planning for the project started before 2016. All the Zambia farmers they work with cultivate possibly one acre of corn each.
What these farmers were producing, he said, is what they consumed during the year. The project’s plan was to be able to increase their yields so that they could survive on what they produced and sell their excess in order to sustain their farming concerns, earning some money along the way.
From the first experimental crops with 11 farmers, Dolbeare said the project was a success. That group was able to increase double their yields and increase the size of the ears of corn.
These farmers, he said, do their planting in November and December.
“We started with a $79,000 grant,” he said. During that first crop season, three members made multiple trips to Zambia.
They started with soil samples and then taught the basics of crop production.
Over the years, they held several field days, and each time the number of farmers joining the project has increased.
That first year, because it was an experiment, the grant provided the seed and what the farmers needed to help them.
“The results were really dramatic,” Dolbeare said to the Bowling Green Rotary Club members. He spoke with them last December when he first introduced them to the project’s parameters.
With each of those farmers during the initial growing season cultivating two acres—one using their traditional methods and one using the new methods being taught—they were able to increase their yields by 230%.
They would have been even better, Dolbeare explained, but one of the farmers trusted the project enough to use their method for both acres, so they only could use the results from 10 of the farmers.
In year two of the project, Dolbeare said they increase to more than 30 farmers and provided seed to just the first group. They wanted to use those first farmers as mentors and to show them that this type of yield was possible continuously if they followed the guidelines from the project.
Each year the project grew. But because of travel restrictions because of COVID, Dolbeare and the other could not make as many trips to Zambia. But the project did have enough funds to hire someone locally to help oversee the farming operations.
Because the farmers wanted to expand even more, they asked for some mechanization. Up until them, the farmers by hand.
In order to get the equipment, he explained, they needed the Zambian farmers to form a co-op, so that no one person would own the tractor and planting equipment.
“We needed 50 to buy into the co-op to make it work,” he said. They got 57 farmers that first year.
The co-op is now being run as an income-producing business so it can sustain itself, Dolbeare said during an earlier presentation. And any farmer who wants to join the co-op must go through the training.
Karen Stoeckley, a member of the Louisiana Rotary Club, accompanied Dolbeare to the meeting to ask that the Bowling Green club commit to help fund the project so that it could continue to build momentum.
Her husband, John, died earlier this year and one of his family’s requests was for people to donate to the Louisiana Rotary Club, so that they could use the funds for one of their causes. She chose to use the donations for this project.
“People were so generous to John,” she said through her tears, as they raised more than $6,000. If the Bowling Green club joined with several others, she added, and committed to just $1,500 annually, this project could continue helping the farmers grow enough food to feed themselves and others in Zambia, as well as becoming sustainable. She and her children are making a commitment on their own of $1,000 a year for the project. She and Eric plan on visiting other Rotary clubs to ask that they, too, join in supporting this project.
“And our club is going to match that,” she said.
Currently, there are nine villages participating with more than 230 farmers.
But it is still difficult for them to help. The rural population lives in extreme poverty and the area is subject to long droughts. This is why it takes a sustained effort to encourage these farmers to continue with the project.