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Yesterday, I took a little ride up the main road to Siem Reap to see what I could see. We have had a couple of major rainstorms, which should have started to soften the soil enough for farmers to start plowing the fields which they will be planting to rain-fed rice. About 17km or so north of town, there is a large lake which spans both sides of the road. There is not a lot right around the lake, along the road there is a little place to buy snacks and lounge in a hammock lakeside.

However, I was interested in the farm across the road from the snack dealers.

They have a diverse little homegarden set up: coconuts, toddy palms, bananas, bamboo, cassava, and a bunch of other trees which I did not recognize. However, they also had a small irrigated plot of mung beans which you can see over on the far right of the image (it is tough to see, but look for the tree branches used for trellises).

Also grazing freely in this area along the lakeshore, near the farm, was a small herd of cows. I do not know who the owners were. I often see cows wandering freely, though herds grazing far from home will be tended by young boys. In this case, I think that they might have benefited from allocating someone to watch the cows. Clearly the forage around the lake is not in very good condition. However, mung beans are rich in nitrogen and likey pretty tasty (with forages, there is an inverse relationship between carbon and nitrogen content, which is mirrored in palatability– woody stuff does not taste as good, and has less protein). The cows are onto this.

There is a light fence protecting the bean plot, though I think that it was just constructed of bamboo and debris, and am certain that it was not particularly robust.

Breach it and they will come…

From another angle, you can see the end result. I did not stick around to see if the others joined their fellows in the bean plot. Note also the irrigation pump.

The farmers were no where to be seen. But I feel for them. Having hurled both stones and curses at cows and lazy herdboys in my maize/pigeon pea intercropping demonstration plots back in Tanzania, I can sympathize (believe me, more civil attempts at negotiation were totally ineffective). I am a strong advocate of live fencing, nice, dense thorny stuff. I have seen people use Pandanus to that effect here, but I do not yet know how well it would do when the floods are up. However, I think that there is a common farmstead rattan which would work on flooding areas. Though I have seen that managed more as clumps or thick hedgerows. I expect that I will have a better grip on the fencing situation, once I am out talking to farmers more often.

Fences and hedgerows are not just for keeping things in or out. They are pretty important ecologically too, potentially representing a substantial fraction of a landscape’s agrodiversity and contributing significantly to landscape heterogeneity. They are places to grow or manage useful plants (be they for medicines, food, fodder, mulch, firewood and more). Moreover, they can be crucial habitat for anything from beneficial predatory insects (as in, the kind that eats agricultural pests) to birds, herps and more.

Mind you, these are just my musings on fencing. I am not here to tell anyone what to do. My goal is a better understanding of what they are doing, how it is changing and why.