By RICHARD SITLER
Indiana Correspondent

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In the book Texas Hold ’Em by Richard “Kinky” Friedman, the cigar-smoking, Texan country singer and writer who became a politician recalled his experience in the Peace Corps in Borneo.

“With country music still in my head after I graduated from the University of Texas, I joined the Peace Corps and worked for 11 cents an hour in the jungles of Borneo,” Friedman wrote. “As an agricultural extension worker, my job was to help people who’d been farming successfully for more than 2,000 years to improve their agricultural methods.”

That irony is common among Peace Corps volunteers, said Frank X. Higdon. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer in The Philippines from 1983-85 after graduating with a degree in agronomy from Virginia Tech.

“I would agree that (the U.S.) agriculture system has evolved in a different way. It is highly mechanized,” explained Higdon, who is now a Peace Corps recruiter looking for volunteers with agricultural experience.

“There is more machinery, and there are more chemicals. In some ways that presents a challenge to someone who has been educated differently.”

He said most agriculture in the “developing world” is done by hand; it forces Peace Corps volunteers to go back to the basics. Higdon added there is an extension of commercial agriculture in the Third World, and there is a chance to transfer skills.

Though he has studied soil biology, Higdon recognized that improving agriculture is more than a technical issue.

“If it were just a matter of transferring technology, then development issues would have been solved years ago.” Higdon said. “Not everything can be solved by a John Deere and a sprayer.”

He added that small-scale commercial farms are the foundation for stable rural economies in many parts of the industrialized world, and those farms could build a more dynamic agricultural sector in the developing world.

Small farms in many emerging economies are struggling to adapt traditional farming techniques in the face of a rapidly changing climate and increasingly unstable agricultural markets.

As global ag markets expand, little attention has focused on the importance of small-scale producers in maintaining local food supplies, Higdon reported. As a result, global food supplies are at historic lows, and this poses a threat to the food security of many developing nations.

Small-scale farms
As a volunteer, Higdon was involved in solving the challenges faced by small-scale farmers in the developing world. He was attached to the ministry of agriculture in The Philippines and worked on a project called SALT (Sloping Agriculture Land Technology).

The project involved planting permanent nitrogen-fixing trees as hedgerows. Between these hedgerows, crops would be planted.

He worked in tandem with members of the Baptist Rural Life Center, which had a mission in The Philippines. Higdon also worked with tilapia fish ponds; integrating the fish into rice ponds.

Higdon switched majors in college from geology to agronomy because of a wider awareness of world events including famine in Ethiopia. He decided that he wanted to serve in Peace Corps and work to make a difference.

“It fired up my imagination,” he said.

Many people in developing countries rely on subsistence farming for their food. Because of that many Peace Corps volunteers without a background in farming find themselves getting involved in some form of agriculture-related work in their primary or secondary projects.

Aron Rosenthal, a volunteer in Guatemala, is one such example. Rosenthal graduated from the University of Colorado with a communications degree.

He now serves as a municipal development volunteer in a highland, rural community in Guatemala. His work puts him in contact with people who make their living from small farms. His primary work benefits these small farmers.

However, he has taken on a secondary project of raising rabbits and vermiculture. Rosenthal added the secondary project to show people in his community that it is possible to raise rabbits on local resources.

Rosenthal has selectively bred the rabbits, and he feeds them a diet of all-natural plants picked from areas around his community.

The rabbits are fed plants that are considered weeds in Guatemala. He mixes the waste from the rabbits with red worms that are creating soil which he gives to his landlords for their gardens.

Rosenthal hopes to teach sustainable agriculture methods.

The biggest wish for Peace Corps volunteers is for projects to live on after they have left, Higdon said.

Adapting techniques
For agriculture to be sustainable in the Third World, techniques must be developed. Many policymakers are beginning to question how to best adapt industrial farming techniques for a small-farm audience.

For example, if capital-heavy farming practices are the answer, how can small-scale farmers use them in a way that increases their income while conserving and protecting their natural resources and traditional crops?

Higdon said some observers worry that increasing the scale of industrial-farming practices could negatively impact the long-term sustainability and profitability of small-scale farmers. The Peace Corps has been called upon to help small-scale producers to adapt their farming practices to use the most appropriate techniques from the industrialized world.

The agency is searching for Americans with experience to serve as technical agricultural specialists in countries that need their specific skills in developing a more sustainable and appropriately scaled commercial farm sector.

Nothing compares to the challenges and rewards of two years of Peace Corps service as a technical agricultural specialst, Higdon added.

“As valuable as your technical skills are at home, they can literally change lives when put to use as a Peace Corps volunteer,” he concluded.