Miracle in a lifeless pit; quarry restoration in Kenya - Special Issue: Environmental Restoration

How could any place be so lifeless?, I wondered. Not a wisp of grass showed anywhere. Not an insect crept among the rocks. I was standing on fossil coral rubble left in an abandoned quarry near Mombasa on the coast of Kenya. It was a man-made desert, created after the Bamburi Cement Company had dug out 30 feet of limestone.

Yet a five-minute walk away, over a ridge on the same Bamburi site, I found myself in one of the most luxuriant scenes I have encountered in Kenya. Trees towered all around. Lush grass proliferated underfoot. Insects swarmed and birds fitted about. Up ahead, fish bunched in a series of pools. A hippo wallowed contentedly. Crocodiles sunned themselves. Beyond them, cattle, sheep and goats grazed with herds of semi-domesticated eland and oryx.

"It's surprising what nature can do when you lend a helping hand," explained my companion, Rene Haller, a stocky Swiss agronomist. "The trick is to get something started, a few plants, then let nature get on with it Africa-style." A self-trained specialist in restoring man-blighted lands, Haller, now in his 50s, is manager of Baobab Farm, a Bamburi subsidiary set up to reclaim the quarry. "The company asked me to do something, anything, to conceal the scars of its quarrying," he says. "Here you see some results of working with nature."

Haller's "results" are remarkable. He has restored more than 250 of almost 900 acres of blasted landscape, but the significance of his work goes far beyond the mere reclamation of a derelict quarry. Haller has made Bamburi a ray of hope for a continent with some of the worst environmental problems on Earth. In the process, he has demonstrated to small-scale farmers that they, too, can make their marginal lands fruitful. If Haller's message can be spread widely enough, throngs of peasants, whose rudimentary agriculture now tends to lay waste to their soil, can regenerate their environments and enhance their living standards.

Haller's success has been to combine his own brand of low-cost pragmatism with time-proven customs and new farming techniques. Development experts have long proclaimed the virtues of using local plants and animals for innovative agriculture - especially for a technique known as agriforestry, which combines growing trees with raising crops and livestock. Trees supply fuelwood, building poles, foods and livestock browse, and some species add natural fertilizer to the soil. Above all, the theory goes, trees protect the African earth, and they represent the best approach to the regreening of the continent. The problem has been producing the goods without costly inputs of fuel and fertilizer. Yet Haller has managed to get it all together using a return to traditional agriculture - and brains rather than money.

Meticulously organized and ever inventive, Rene Haller exudes effervescent good spirits. He is one part bright-eyed eyed of ideas, another part hard-nosed entrepreneur. "There's always a better way," he says, and "everything must pay its way."

Haller's African success story began in 1959 when he arrived in Mombasa to join the cement company. Bamburi was already a major Kenya enterprise, mining prehistoric beds of coral for limestone to manufacture cement. Cement was so precious in a developing country that at first nobody objected if the operation left horrendous gashes across the landscape. But the company began to grow sensitive about its scarred-earth image. So it turned to agronomist Haller. They would pay his salary to restore plant cover, give him some staff, and lend him a little equipment - that was it. Just the sort of challenge Haller welcomed.

But how to get anything, anything at all, to grow on bare coral with virtually no underground water? Walking with Haller around a newly abandoned patch of quarry, I scuffed the surface with my boot. The action left more impression on my foot than on the ground. "The earth is so rock hard," explained Haller, "that I have to get my staff to dig holes with picks before I plant trees."

All told, Haller has found only a half-dozen tree species that can prosper in such hostile conditions. The best one appears to be casuarina, a needle-leaved tree that soars once it gets a foothold in the harsh Bamburi terrain. It is one of those specialized plants that supply their own nitrogen fertilizer by plucking the raw material out of the atmosphere. So vigorously have Haller's casuarinas grown that his grove of several dozen acres produced no less than 50 tons of fuelwood after only five years of growth.

Two other species, planted in tandem, tell a special tale of Haller's ingenuity. The fast-growing Conocarpus, viewed by traditional foresters almost as a "weed," has been scarcely used on plantations despite the excellent charcoal it produces. Its drawback is that it requires fertilizer. The Prosopis, a relative of the American mesquite shrub, is not so super-speedy at growing, but it fixes atmospheric nitrogen. It also produces masses of flowers for honeymaking, plus fruits suitable for livestock feed. A plantation of both trees produces a far better forest than if the two species are grown separately.

This kind of interrelatedness is the key factor in all of Haller's activities. "Nature does not do things by compartments, nor should we, if we are to take advantage of the full natural bounty of the Earth," he philosophizes.

His livestock program illustrates that principle as well. Baobab Farm's 258 acres support 500 sheep, 160 goats and 25 cattle. The animals feed on grass that now grows among the trees in a thin layers of new soil produced from leaf litter. They also eat foliage and other sorts of fodder. generated by the diverse types of plantings. "If my pasture were open grassland, the livestock would not survive a drought year," Haller says. "But the forest provides shade as well as food, and it saves them during the drier periods."

In among the domestic animals roam 25 eland and 20 oryx, antelopes that normally live wild in Kenya. They are hardy and need next to no water. They also eat different plants from those consumed by conventional livestock, so they do not compete for scarce forage. They produce more meat per unit of animal weight than does a typical African cow, contain more protein, and if Kenya's laws banning sale of wildlife products are changed, could yield commercial meat.

Still another source of protein produced at Baobab is fish. Initially, Haller used the forest lakes at Bambury to experiment with aquaculture, stocking his ponds with tilapia, a succulent fish that proliferates in East Africa's natural lakes. Since the ponds contained weeds and algae, he left the tilapia largely to their own devices. Then, following the lead of experts involved in intensive fish-farming in Asia, he built a series of fish-rearing tanks, restoring the ponds to natural pools once again.

The outcome is an unparalleled success. As Haller enthusiastically explains, raising domestic fish is probably the most efficient method known for producing animal protein. The fish need just under two pounds of feed to produce one pound of flesh. By comparison, cattle generally have a "conversion ration" of about 10:1. Haller's intensive system produces 35 tons of fish a year from a mere one-third of an acre. It is at least as economic, he points out, as going to sea in a boat to catch "wild" fish.

As with most of Haller's ideas, there are easy-to-duplicate lessons for local people. Every "Shamba," or smallholder plot of a few acres, has space for a simple pond lined with clay, gravel or sand. The owner throws in a few fingerlings, then occasional handfuls of farm garbage. An that's it. A 10-square-yard pond can generate more animal protein in a week than many Africans get in a month.

Already, Haller's package has been adopted throughout much of Kenya and in several other countries of Africa, principally by farmers' associations, village cooperatives, and government and development agencies. In addition, his methods have won the praise of the United Nations agency that leads the field in fish affairs, the Food and Agriculture Organization, He's also attracting the interest of the World Bank, an agency that normally deals only in superscale projects.

Meanwhile, the start-out ponds have steadily attracted an array of birdlife - 130 species in all. The pond area and the original forest expanse have been fenced off, and the 18-acre enclosure now accommodates several buffalo, bushback, duiker, suni, warthogs, hippos, civet cats, mongooses, snakes, and crocodiles. Haller now charges admission to tourists to see this new side of his operation.

Local people, who also visit, are introduced to other aspects of Haller's integrated philosophy. One of the newest is crocodile farming. Haller feeds 700 young crocs a diet of fish offal and waste from livestock carcasses. The crocs, raised in the original fish ponds and in a crocodile compound, cost nothing to keep, and when they reach sufficient length within just a few years, Haller will make a tidy profit by marketing their high-value skins. In turn, their meat will be fed back to the fish.

And that's only the beginning. In moister parts of his farm. Haller harvest surplus earthworms which offer top-grade protein for his tilapias. In waste-flow channels, he raises giant African snails for human food. And he plans to use fish excrement and general fish-pond sludge to generate biogas for energy. He has introduced millipedes into his casuarina groves to speed the transformation of leaf litter into soil. He is growing grapes for winemaking on steep hillsides, collecting honey from hives he established in his Prosopis trees, and even growing bananas using ingenious but simple methods to coax moisture from the normally dry soil.

Such inventiveness may be an antidote to many of Kenya's problems. The bulk of the country's population is made up of small-scale cultivators - and the population, now 20 million, is already overloading the nation's capacity to support it. For these hard-pressed multitudes, whose numbers may double by the year 2000, the value in Haller's operation is that a farmer can often get the most from his patch of land by enabling it to produce food, fiber, and fuel all at once in a mutually supportive mixture. In the past, Western agriculturists have generally taught Africans that segmented plots and monocultures are "good farming" and that a mixed system is messy. Now those ideas have to be unlearned.

Part of the beauty of Haller's model is its low cost. Baobab Farm is essentially self-financing. Although Haller is on the company's payroll, the supplies fish, meat, fruit, and fuelwood for the company's work force, and he sells more to outsiders. He also gets revenues from those organizations that pay for his expertise, and he collects entrance fees from tourists. It is a measure of the profitability of his enterprise that it keeps on expanding - and that Haller can keep on trying out new ideas. "I would not want anything else," he explains. "How could I possibly promote it to others if it did not stand up commercially?

And Haller's ideas are being promoted. As word gets around, more local farmers are coming to see what they can try out back home. I met such a group, from near Nairobi 300 miles inland. Why had they traveled all that way?, I asked. "Well, our children are many and our acres are few. The chief of our village tells us we must look for fresh horizons in here," their leader said, pointing to his head. "We had heard of this Swiss man who smiles and makes something out of nothing. We wan to see for ourselves."

Similarly, I talked with a delegation from farms 50 miles away along the coast, on their way out from the quarry forest. "Now we see the difference," one of them said, "between wasteland and wasted land. Here is a forest growing on a desert. And I heard that some trees are fertilizer factories, but I thought it was just another expert's tale. My eyes tell me the truth."

COPYRIGHT 1990 Point Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group