Sgt. 1st Class Jason Jacobs of Covington plows a test plot in Khost Province, Afghanistan, on a tractor shipped overseas by the Army.
[Advertisement]
In Purdue classrooms, National Guard units learn how to plant wheat by tossing seeds into rocky soil. They’re taught about growing crops on 1-acre plots that have little water and no irrigation system.
They’re not the high-tech agricultural practices Purdue University is known for, but those techniques – outdated generations ago on U.S. farms and a far cry from the 1,000-acre fertile farms of Indiana – help keep American soldiers safer in Afghanistan, an Army general told Congress.
A military unit teaching farm tips to Afghan civilians? What does that have to do with the Obama administration’s stepped-up priority for the Afghanistan mission?
“It provides force protection for my soldiers,” Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army vice chief of staff, told a Senate subcommittee. “When we do that, we are safer. We must do that.”
One 60-member Indiana National Guard unit arrived in Afghanistan’s Khost province, along the border with Pakistan, in March. Its mission is to help Afghan farmers regain the knowledge lost as two generations of farmers were swept up in the Soviet invasion, civil war and the harsh rule of the Taliban.
“A lot of generational knowledge that gets passed down from father to son on different ways and successful ways to do agriculture has really been severed,” said Maj. Shawn Gardner, operations officer of the 1-19th Agribusiness Development Team of the Indiana National Guard.
Gardner’s team has passed on information on how to trellis grape vines, making them more productive. They’ve spent time analyzing the soil and worked on a formula using nearby compounds that can enrich it so farmers can bypass expensive imported soil nutrients.
Female members of the unit have worked with Afghan women to raise chickens more efficiently inside their walled compounds and to manage more effectively their orchards, which are usually women’s responsibility.
There are communication difficulties, to be sure, Gardner said. A meeting that might take half an hour stateside can last three or four hours because of the time needed for translation, Gardner said in a telephone interview from Afghanistan.
And there are cultural barriers to overcome, “but there’s a common bond between farmers,” said Gardner, who grew up on a farm near Evansville. “You share the same love of the land.”
Different world
The 1-19th is the first of several National Guard agribusiness teams to be trained at Purdue and then sent to Afghanistan. The 1-19th is made up of Hoosier farmers and people who have degrees in agricultural specialties.
Units from Kansas, Texas, Tennessee and Missouri are in the process of preparing for similar deployments, spending weeks at Purdue to get specialized training.
Despite the agricultural background of the units’ members – who have academic and real-life experience in soil science, animal husbandry, marketing, forestry and orchards – they must learn how to apply those skills to a region unlike what they’re familiar with.
For instance, a typical Hoosier farm is 1,200 to 1,500 acres and supports one family.
But in Afghanistan, said agriculture professor Kevin McNamara, the project’s leader at Purdue, “a typical farm is half an acre to two acres. On the same amount of land of a typical farmer here, you might have 1,000 farms.
“They use animal traction. They generally don’t use fertilizer-improved seed. The concepts and the technology that people use are so different,” McNamara said.
McNamara supplements his knowledge of Afghanistan, where he served in the Peace Corps in the 1970s, with the suggestions from a group of Afghans who are working on master’s degrees in agriculture at Purdue.
“We were able to really give the Guard members very good insights into what they’re going to see, how they might look for opportunities for them to help improve farm productivity or farm income there at the margins,” he said.
“We’re not going to make everybody rich there overnight, but there are things we can do to improve people’s lives and help them become more productive.”
Better livelihoods
Improving the lives of Afghanistan’s civilian population is a critical component of the U.S. military mission in a country where the Sept. 11 attacks were planned, where al-Qaeda still operates and where the world’s largest supply of heroin-producing poppies is grown, said Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind.
“Success in Afghanistan may depend on the attitudes of the people, the progress of reconstruction and the development of the economy as much as it depends on battlefield victories,” he said at the confirmation hearing for the ambassador to Afghanistan.
One of those areas, he said, involves improving the state of agriculture and smoothing relations with the civilian population.
“The claim of the Afghan leadership is that the people cultivate poppies for their livelihood and, furthermore, sometimes they’re intimidated by the interests that want the poppies,” he said. “Unless there is some alternative for these farmers in terms of their livelihood, they’re going to continue in those illicit trades.
“We are sometimes going in and tearing up the soil so the (poppy) crop can’t grow,” Lugar said, “which creates a great resentment in the population, seeing their only income disappearing. It runs at cross purposes of any hope of gaining the allegiance of the population, the rank-and-file people.”
Without the good will among the civilian population, Gardner said, U.S. troops are at more risk.
“If you can improve the economy and you can give jobs to military-age males that can help them go out and provide for their families, it’s going to make them less likely to maybe go plant an IED or something along those lines,” he said.
