on the thesis front...Matthias

FROM MATTHIAS

Like Asantewaa, I am working in ethiopia on the trees for food security project guided by the powerful World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF).  This may also be the reason why things are more or less well organized and objectives are quite clear. However, I am in another site of the project and having a slightly different focus. In general, I am also looking on local knowledge about the impact of trees on soil fertility but I am having a focus on the different soils in the landscape. I am trying to explore the soil part by integrating a methodology about identifying local soil quality indicators, developed by Edmundo Barrios (link). I am lucky that I am attending a workshop by him and other ICRAF people about participatory experimental research design right in this moment. The overall methodology has been developed by our guru Fergus Sinclair and is called AKT5. AKT5 is a program that is designed to store, organize and analyze local knowledge. In order to get the information, which we will add to the database, we conduct many interviews with farmers and thus squeeze the information out of them. In the end the data will be used to get an idea about the knowledge of farmers and how to complement to this knowledge as well as serving as a base for designing appropriate interventions.

I have been working at my site for one month and I am now at a point where I have to analyze what I have got and focus more on specific issues.  I am struggling a little bit in this case because there are many interesting issues in the area but I have to take care that they produce valuable data for the project. I do also have to enter all the information obtained by farmers into the complicated language of the program, which is not fun at all. However, I believe the communication barriers I am facing by using a translator are much bigger and often more exhausting than anything else. After the project I will go to the headquarter of ICRAF in gangster town Nairobi and start analyzing soil samples and data.

Even though I am pretty much on my own in the field, I get pretty much support by the organization and the supervisors. It is always interesting to talk to other researchers of ICRAF (like in this workshop) and get an idea about future working oportunities. However, sometimes I feel a little bad when people are telling me about possible phDs or working oportunities and I just picture myself relaxing big time after handing in my master-thesis.

on the thesis front...Alan

It's thesis time for the second year sudents. We've been keeping a bit in touch and the stories all seem to match, a bit of chaos, a bit of nervousness, some frustation and expectations, and oh yeah...even research; maybe we should call it the 'research process', fun. I clarify, we're sort of in the beginning-middle of it, so at the stage between planning and doing fieldwork (the wake up call).

Anyway, we'll share a bit here and there of what we're up to.

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The decision to go to Bangor was because of its Agroforestry programme, and with a bit of luck I landed an opportunity to work with coffee agroforestry systems in Central America. Speaking Spanish helps, for sure!, specially doing local knowledge work and interviewing lots of coffee producers. I'm currently in the north-central high valleys of Nicaragua, focusing in the region around a nature reserve called Peñas Blancas . You can imagine the landscape, a mosaic of agriculture (maize, beans, potatos, coffee, bananas, taro), livestock pastures, abandoned (even shifted) fields, patches of forest, roads and communities. I've yet to see a sloth, maybe soon now that the rains have started and it's a bit cooler. The whole socioeconomic context is intriguing, a conservation agenda working to save and restore the water service provided by the massive stone and forest mountains; the most productive coffee region in the country, the main national export commodity, with farmers vulnerable to global coffee prices and a fungus disease that wiped out entire farms last season; smallholders and huge coffee estates; national organizations and international donors trying their best; failing and succesful farmer cooperatives, a social democratic political party with a strong presidential leadership, numerous evangelical churches, etc...really interesting to say the least, and really welcoming and amazing people basing their livelihoods on the "brown gold".  But anyway, I'm working with trees, that is farmer's perceptions of tree attributes and characteristics, how they classify them, what services they provide to them, what species they use, why, an what they know from observation and experience with working with trees on their coffee farms. So if you take a look, it would be hard to miss the guabas (Inga spp.), bananas and wood tree species that are intercropped with coffee or placed somewhere else in the farms and landscape. As for methods, I'm mainly doing some semi-structured interviews and a tree-attribute ranking exercise with coffee producers, which will additionally feed into an existing knowledge base started a few years back. That's what ICRAF is interested in finding out, and that's where I fit in the whole picture.

Coffee with a little help from the mulch of bananas and the shade of guabas.

- "Seen any suspicious logging activity?", - "Ahhh, nope"

Doing the tree ranking exercise under the shade of a malay apple tree.