this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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'Forgotten' water harvesting system transforms 'barren wasteland' into thriving farmland (www.upworthy.com)
submitted 3 days ago by SteveKLord@slrpnk.net to c/farming@slrpnk.net
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Just a few years ago, the Sahel region at the northern edge of Senegal was a "barren wasteland" where nothing had grown for 40 years. But the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and local villagers teamed up to regreen the area, bringing back agriculture, improving the economy of the people who live there, and preventing the climate migration that desertification ultimately leads to.

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[–] dgkf@lemmy.ml 45 points 3 days ago (5 children)

I’ve seen a few posts on this and it’s always exciting to see this mix of cultural wisdom and environmentalism.

But I’m always left wondering why we aren’t supporting these communities with some heavy equipment to do this. From the article it takes a person an entire day to dig one of these moons. Surely some construction equipment could work order(s?) of magnitude faster. I can’t help the hinting feeling that we’re offloading all of the burdens of addressing global climate change onto the communities that are already paying the steepest price.

Is it the climate? How remote the locations are? Challenges with sourcing parts? Hope someone can clarify why heavy equipment would be prohibitive.

[–] HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 37 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Surely some construction equipment could work order(s?) of magnitude faster.

You have to supply the support network for the equipment. For a lot of less developed areas, it isn't worth it to supply a tractor which will become a statue.

[–] Steve@startrek.website 19 points 2 days ago

And part of the project is to employ local labor

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 25 points 3 days ago (1 children)

These are always only pilot projects with limited funding. And who do you think is more likely to maintain this infrastructure and proudly tell their neighbours about them so that they can replicate it? Surely not the person that is annoyed that some rich guy from the capital with a digger came and did all the work and took all the money that they would have happily earned. These largely subsistence communities are cash starved and projects like that are a welcome opportunity to earn some money on the side.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

The difference in efficiency is so high, you could run through with the backhoe and then give locals the money anyway.

[–] stabby_cicada@slrpnk.net 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Community buy-in is more important than efficiency in projects like this.

"The process started with the community-based participatory planning," WFP program policy officer Bakalilou Diaby shares in the video. "By the end of this process, it was agreed that one of the major action is the land reclamation or land recovery project."

At first, it took some time to convince the community that the regreening of the degraded landscape was even possible, but after learning about how to improve the land, "the people believe and they are convinced, and they are also committed," says Diaby.

Sure, these projects could be done more efficiently by one construction company with heavy machinery, but that takes dollars these dirt poor areas don't have (and I think Trump's bullshit arbitrary defunding of USAID is an object lesson for developing countries not to rely on foreign charity for anything important, among many, many other reasons why foreign charity is bad for development). So local people need to know how to do it with local resources in order to expand the projects to new areas.

Just as important, local communities need to support and maintain these projects in the long run, and sweat equity is a great way to build commitment.

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Something along the lines of "hiring heavy equipment, then buying a ticket to the gym, everytime you need this done because you never learned anything else". My neighbours tell me I need heavy equipment to fell my forest, absolutely not, I'll go on foot, respect and fell every single tree I plan to fell, leave no tracks, become stronger and wiser, all for free.

Heavy equipment is not cheap, too, especially if you need an operator with skill comparable with attention to small details that manual laborers have naturally. And it does not spread virally like skills. And it burns carbon and leaves tracks. It has its uses at scale, but not in pilots. Same thing everywhere: I have a pick-and-place robot to assemble my electronics, not even turning it on before I have at least 100-ish boards to assemble; it's not expensive, it's easier than manual labor - but you've got to know the system you build before giving it away to a machine, or you'll have a long and expensive debug session ahead of you, even if you are certain know everything about it, which is totally not the case here.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works -1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Oh no... tracks. In the barren wasteland. Where the whole point is creating divots for water.

[–] Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

You got a well-written, thoughtful and meaningful comment, and you mined it for one nitpick to sarcastically attack as if it was the whole point.

Pearls before swine.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

It's dissembling nonsense on every level. The first sentence doesn't even parse. Half the comment is irrelevant self-congratulatory wank about trees and electronics. There's about fifteen contiguous words that matter, at all, and they're buried in the middle of three half-wrong sentences.

The scale of this "pilot" wasn't one fucking hole. It's acres of them. A single backhoe would still be busy for weeks.

I only picked one nit because it highlights the failure to recognize what matters, here. Tracks are not a negative. There's no grass being torn up, like the nimble woodsman here seems to be picturing. It's barren wasteland.

That picked nit, by the way, was a concise and impersonal rebuke of only that point. When I want to attack someone I am not fucking subtle. But thanks for dragging this all out, with your performative eye-rolling that contributes nothing but unpleasant disdain.

[–] Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

All three of the "sentences" in your reply don't fucking parse if you want to be goddamn garmmar nazi about it.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's fragmentary delivery of one sentence which you plainly understood just fine.

Actual hypocrisy would be you mining a wide-ranging rebuke for that failed riposte.

[–] Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It wasn't hypocrisy, I was demonstrating a lack of respect for anything you had to say, just like you did. Doesn't feel good, does it?

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

That's still hypocrisy, dipshit. And projection.

You don't get to condescend to me after getting the detail you barged in to sneer about, and then doing the exact thing you were sneering about.

[–] Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Hypocrisy means a lack of self-reflection, and I am perfectly able to reflect on the fact that I was deliberately disrespecting you, and I think it was a fine thing to do actually.

You took a meaningful, thoughtful reply and dismissed it with a nitpick that, by the way, completely missed the point.

Your response to my critique was pure toxicity, just laden with contempt for me and the other commenter. The fact you started with a grammatical complaint shows how utterly shallow and vapid your replies are.

You're an asshole, and I have no trouble talking to you like an asshole. However, I won't let you waste any more of my time, so this is the last thing I'll say to you. Feel free to shock me by not being an asshole in your final reply.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

Hypocrisy means double standards, you tone-policing projection addict.

You called me swine.

You called me swine for a polite jibe about dirt.

Fuck entirely off with your high-horse posturing, after barging in to deliver that baseless feigned offense. Which I met, by the way, with a blunt version of the detailed response you fucking wanted. A courtesy you seem incapable of meeting in kind. Because of course, you, the protagonist of reality, get to declare me persona non grata, but god forbid anyone else consider a comment rambling and irrelevant. It was so detailed! About trees, for some reason, and gyms, and electronics?

Oh no I'm sorry, that previous sentence wasn't rigidly diagram-friendly, which is what you think "parse" means. No. It means, I still have no idea why that guy mentioned his gym. That part, which I only touched on because you pushed me to address it, fuckface, was not even the nit initially picked.

I am treating you as an equal. I hold you to your own standards. You are found sorely lacking. Worst of all for the inevitable 'see I knew it' response, as if anything short of groveling apology wouldn't be dismissed as such.

[–] L0rdMathias@sh.itjust.works 22 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I can't say for certain, but I'll take a stab at an answer that isn't just "to cut costs obviously lmao".

Part of the purpose of these ecological initiatives is to figure out ways to do things at scale without the need for industrial waste/pollution.

Second, it is best practice in most any industry to create and optimize the process by hand BEFORE figuring out how to optimize it with heavy industry. If you begin the design under the handicap of a machine, then your entire design is founded on that crutch. You can always incorporate machinery, but it's often more difficult to remove it from any process once it's been integrated.

[–] flicker@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I know absolutely nothing about living in the desert but I bet driving heavy equipment on sand (hard-packed or not) is a risky business.

[–] paranoia@feddit.dk -3 points 3 days ago

Driving heavy equipment on sand is not that risky. We're talking a single digger here, not a 1000t mobile crane.

[–] DV8@lemmy.world 12 points 3 days ago (1 children)

But I’m always left wondering why we aren’t supporting these communities with some heavy equipment to do this.

From the different videos I've seen on this it's also because they are both teaching people to do this themselves and pay them for doing it at the same time. Thus supporting the local economy and sort of kick-starting it. Getting one outsider to do it with a tractor doesn't create local attachment to this.

[–] exasperation@lemm.ee -1 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Why can't the locals be trained to operate and maintain the tractor?

[–] DV8@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Probably also because there's more than one community they need to support and there's only one person who would receive additional income, instead of most in the community. And by teaching all to do it manually and showing the impact. (Which is making more land suitable for sustenance farming)

And getting local support is always vital to create long lasting success. Using a tractor would probably not guarantee this.

Then again you might get better answers if you look up some of these videos by organisations covering this. They usually have titles like "turning the dessert green again"

[–] exasperation@lemm.ee 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I don't really see it as a fixed amount of work that needs to be distributed among all the people. Getting more half moons dug in a shorter amount of time will reclaim a lot more farmland, and will have labor opportunities in actually working the land.

Digging out the half moon, one per person per day, is only the start. These communities are trying to actually grow crops, too. So it seems that if you have a pool of labor available, the upper limit is going to be how much agricultural land area can be managed by that labor pool. At that point digging more half moon patches isn't going to create any more opportunities (unless we're talking about improving the agricultural productivity per worker, and should probably talk about farming equipment too). If the income is to come from the crops they produce, shouldn't increasing the output of crops be economically good for that community?

It seems that using equipment would transform a larger quantity of land, which is good for the environment in general. Then, the economic impact would still be distributed among the entire workforce, able to work that land and do the actual agriculture.

What am I missing?

[–] DV8@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

When looking up more details it seems that it's actually not possible to make them mechanically. It's considered one of the disadvantages despite their simple and cheap implementation.

Edit: I think you're also applying a western image of what farmland is to this situation. I don't think I can do it justice so I highly recommend you look up some of these videos to get better picture, it's quite interesting and at least some glimmer of hope to see that some land can be reclaimed from erosion and desertification.

[–] belastend@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 days ago

Availability of fuel and spare parts. Using any machinery in desert areas increases their demand for repair. Because sand is nasty.

[–] paranoia@feddit.dk 5 points 3 days ago

The biggest factor is that the cost of labour is extremely low. If the machinery costs €200 in fuel a day, you could instead pay 40 people in these rural and impoverished areas.

[–] houseofleft@slrpnk.net 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Thanks for sharing! This.makes me think of how vacination existed as cultural knowledge in Asia and Africa way before modern medicine adopted it.

[–] flicker@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 3 days ago

Thanks for sharing, Steve. This is such a cool fucking post.