The village of Antananbaobe, ten kilometers from Ambodigavo village (where we will hold our first womens cooperative sewing seminar in late September) is a beautiful village on the road to Anjanaharibe Special Reserve. Antananbaobe is one of the “greenest” villages in our Commune Rurale, surrounded by inter-cropped and forested hillsides home to bamboo lemurs, and surrounding a network of river-irrigated lowland rice paddies. The community is impressively organized and is home to two especially motivated cooperatives, a small blacksmiths association and an active womens cooperative.

As in Ambodigavo, all Antananbaobe community members are subsistence agriculturalists who rely primarily on rice farming to support their families. Rice is the staple of the Malagasy diet and large quantities are eaten three times per day.

Development agencies and environmental organizations are now promoting a more efficient method of rice cultivation developed in Madagascar that can increases crop yield by as much as 4-fold, without using chemicals or non-natural fertilizers. This new method, called SRI, encourages transplanting rice seedlings much earlier than in the conventional method, planting seedlings one-by-one in order to reduce root competition, specially regulating water in the rice field to allow the rice plants more access to oxygen, and regularly weeding paddies with hand-welded contraptions called “sarcleuses”.

By encouraging this slightly different, yet immensely more productive method, Malagasy farmers can increase their food security while decreasing their need to slash and burn rainforested hillsides to make space for often unproductive supplimental rice crops. SRI can play a key role in biodiversity conservation in Madagascar while providing economic and health benefits to Malagasy families. Folks just need to learn how to do it!

The Ambodigavo womens cooperative has 18 members, all eager to learn the SRI rice method and teach others in their community to employ it. Their proposed project, with the support of friends in the United States, is to plant an experimental one-hectare plot of SRI rice in a community-donated paddy near the center of the village.

This will involve an enormous amount of collective effort: using zebu to plow and prepare the field, hand-planting the rice, carefully controlling river-fed irrigation, hand-weeding regularly using locally welded sarcleuses (made by the Antananbaobe blacksmiths association), and hand-harvesting and processing (while these women simultaneously work their respective families’ rice fields). They are, however, very eager to try and see how an experimental single-hectare yield will compare to rice farmed using the traditional method.

It is an excellent community-initiated project and all the Antananbaobe cooperative women are grateful for the support they’ve received from friends abroad! If all goes well, the women of Antananbaobe will become ambassadors for the improved rice farming technique in this wonderful corner of Madagascar.

Trainings and planting should begin in mid-October. I’ll keep you posted on our developments!