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First, let me apologize to my three readers for the length of time between posts. I have been busy with fieldwork, and have not had time to write new posts. On the bright side, this post is the first to include video of some of the farmers who I am working with. The video embedded below is a montage of the steps involved in preparing the seedbed for a rice nursery, from which seedlings will be later transplanted to other fields. This also illustrates one of the solutions some farmers have used in response to the early flooding in August.

embedded by WP Embedded Video

And the direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPlYTx8wb2I

By way of background, in August of this year there was heavy rainfall in the mountains of eastern Kampong Thom and adjacent Preah Vihear Provinces. This flowed downhill and out onto the floodplain, flooding many of the rice fields around the village where I work. Such flooding is a normal part of annual ecosystem processes– flood waters from the uplands flow downhill while floodwaters from the Tonle Sap rise. They usually meet and mix on the floodplains south of the village. This flood pulse is a major factor in driving such a productive system. Land use systems in the village depend upon it. However in this case, the floods arrived about a month early. The water rose very quickly, over just a few days. As a result, rice plants were not yet tall enough to survive the flooding. Even other floodplain grasses such as Oryza rufipogon, important as sources of fodder for livestock, were affected. That first pulse has since receded, and was followed by another pulse of floodwater. Though this second pulse of flooding was on-time, the damage had already been done.

Farmers were, and still are, in a difficult position. Next year is likely to be a difficult one. In response to this flooding, I have seen a few strategies which they are using to mitigate loss. Some farmers have borrowed unflooded, uncultivated land from extended family members and planted another crop. Some are preparing to plant dry season rice in a few months. Others lack seed or resources to buy/borrow seed for another crop, and are waiting for the floods to recede to see how bad their situation is. Signs of coming foreign aid are starting to appear, though I do not yet know how much, who will receive it or who is sending it . A few farmers are using the technique of flood recession rice production. In this technique, as floodwaters recede, the newly revealed land is planted to a rapidly maturing rice variety. The farmer in this video had transplanted his fields 3 days before the early floods. Little of the crop survived, though the few individual plants which did survive were transplanted elsewhere (another crop recovery technique!). As the water drained, he traded seed with another farmer for a more rapidly maturing variety (maturing in about 70 days, as opposed to the 90 or so of the previous variety) and re-established a nursery. Since this video was made, we planted out the seedlings at 3 different sites. He and is family also have rice fields further out on the floodplain which remain flooded even today, and have not recovered. Though this technique may help to buffer his family in the coming year.

The steps illustrated in the video are: plowing, harrowing, baling water from the field with a snaich (water shovel), final seedbed preparation by hand and lastly, sowing of the rice seed. They are pretty typical of the farming techniques which I have seen used by other farmers in the area. What is novel about them is their timing with respect to the flooding and other ecological and agricultural processes. His brief commentary at the end of the clip describes these steps (I ask those more fluent in Khmer than I to forgive any mistakes in my translation)…

Farmer: Today I started by building a snaich (water shovel), an old-style snaich. When I finished with the snaich, I plowed and I harrowed [the field] in order to sow flood recession rice. This flood recession rice, I traded with someone [for the seed], the name [of the variety] is Srauv Chhlong Ndaing. So today, I started a crop of flood recession rice.

Me: Yes, and why did you change rice varieties?

Farmer: The reason that I changed rice varieties…last month I had already sown [a rice crop] and it had grown tall, I had pulled the seedlings from the seedbed and transplanted them already, then when the river water arrived everything was flooded. The variety that was flooded was called Srauv Romdoul. All of my property has been flooded.

This is the first video which I have ever put together. I am hopeful to include a few more, and am especially keen to teach some farmers how to use the camera. I think that their movies would be more interesting than mine!

Lastly, massive thanks to Beth Kanter and Jinja for technical support and encouragement in this new video stuff!

At the request of Refuter, here are some fish.  Actually, I do not have any images of the ones caught by the kids behind the house.  These were caught in a gillnet which was stretched perpendicular to the current, along the border between a rice field and a pond in a completely flooded landscape.

When the heavy rains hit the mountains in the neighboring province a few weeks ago,  all of this water flowed downhill into rivers and onto the floodplain.  Many people have lost at least a portion of their rice crops, because this wash of rainwater came about a month early.  So in many fields, the rice was not yet tall enough to withstand the flooding.  Next year, many families in the village will have problems both with having enough rice to eat, as well as seed for planting.  Ironically, there has been little rainfall the village itself.

This early flood also brought a flush of riverine fish out onto the floodplain, into the waiting nets of fishers.  For a week or so, harvests were pretty good.  However, the water level has since dropped and fewer fish are moving from the rivers onto the floodplain.  Catches are now generally small, both in the total weight of the catch, as well as the average size of any one fish caught.

The water under the house from my earlier post has drained, so the kids have taken their fishing elsewhere.

The village has gone about 2 weeks without rain. This being the rainy season, this is a little unusual. However, it is not that unusual. One of the quirks of the rainy season on the floodplain is that sometimes there are dry spells. For me, as an academic, this is just another reason why farming systems on the floodplain are so fascinating– another occasional surprise which must be dealt with. For the farmers who depend on their rice harvests for their daily caloric intake, it is a much more serious concern. As of yesterday, the lack of rain was a point of discussion. Something which was starting to worry people, but no one I have spoken with was in a panic yet. There have been plenty of promising, black, rumbling clouds like the ones above. But these seem to keep dropping their payload elsewhere.

The rice crops most affected seem to be those most recently sown– the quick maturing rice varieties. These are popular. They mature in about 3 months, and are usually directly sown around this time of year. With the right nutrient management, attention to pests, and a little luck, yields can be higher than with other rice cropping systems used in this area. But the crop needs water. When farmers have the money, and a field located close to a canal or large pond, they may irrigate. However around this village, this is not very common. Thus many of these sites are dependent upon rainfall. So, dry spells early in the season can be very hard on the young plants.

The dry spell left a couple of obvious marks on the landscape. The most obvious is the yellowing, browning and ultimate loss of the newly planted rice. This is evident in the above images. The most recently sown seeds simply fail to germinate and are eaten by birds and rats. The second obvious mark is an increase in weeds, seen in the second image above. As the rice struggles, weeds which are better able to cope with low water levels begin to out-compete the rice plants. I am not yet sure how farmers are going to respond to this, assuming the rain begins again soon. One farmer reported that if they have the time and money, they will re-plow and re-sow the lost fields once there is a good, heavy rain. He did not mention anything about the people who do not have the money.

On the social side, the dry spell has led to a change in daily farming activities. This time of year is the plowing season, among other things. People began to plow the most distant sites several weeks ago. As the season progressed, sites closer and closer to the village are plowed and leveled. The dry spell has slowed this progression. Right now, the soil in many places is too dry and hard to plow. Moreover, many people are waiting to sow the fields which have been recently plowed, as the seed will simply be lost.

Though not everyone is waiting. Yesterday, I took the picture above of a newly sown field. Was it sown in anticipation of rain from one of the aforementioned promising clouds? Does the farmer know something about the soil at that site which I do not? Were they simply impatient? Desperate? I cannot hazard a guess, since I did not meet the landowner to talk to them about their rationale.

Some sites have not been as severely affected. Rice planted in and around poorly-drained depressions is able to take advantage of water remaining in the soil. The image below was taken steps away from the site of the second image, above. The rice in that depression is in much better shape than the rice planted on higher sites (the pattern of soil visible in that field is due to the planting pattern, rather than the lack of rain).

Use of sites like this is a good example of farmers’ appreciation for diversity in the landscape. At first glance, the floodplain seems pancake-flat. However, there are many scattered hills and seasonal ponds– some small, quite large. These create a multitude of microsites– banks, islands, gullies– which farmers can take advantage of. Plantings in and around these wet sites are doing a little better right now than rice on better-drained sites.

There are certainly more tools that people use to navigate the caprice of the weather. Deepwater rice varieties were planted in some ponds and swampy areas around the village months ago. These plants are larger and more mature, so they are not as sensitive to fluctuations in water supply. They also are planted in areas which stay wetter longer, further insulating them. Therefore, the deepwater rice fields have not yet been heavily hit by the lack of rain. I suspect that some of the other rice varieties used by farmers are more drought-tolerant than others. I still need to keep looking around and asking questions.

As I write, it has started raining here in town. This does not mean that any will fall in the village. But I hope that it does.

It seems to be roof repair season in the village.

Over the last week, I noticed that many households in the village were cutting down sugar palm (Borassus flabellifer L., ដើមត្នោត) leaves for the preparation of roofing shingles (ស្លិកកន្ដប). This is not a simple process. First, leaves are cut down. Older leaves are taken, leaving a tuft of newer leaves on the top of the tree for continued growth. I find the cutting to be a daunting task, as the trees grow up to 30m tall. No one else here seems to have a problem with that, as the trees are regularly clumb for palm sap collection. The trees themselves are quite common in the Cambodian farm-scape, and are often found along field and property borders.

Cut leaves are then left for about a day to dry, or until labor can be mustered for the next step. Then, the laminae of the leaves are liberated from the massive petioles (which are set aside for use in other projects, like fencing and cordage preparation– an example is in the background of the picture below, with petioles used to construct a duck coop). The next step is splitting the palmate leaves into individual fingers, each with an intact central vein. This adds structural strength to the individual blades. The intact leaves themselves are very large, so they are first split into managable portions (primal cuts). Then a machete or sharpened wooden wedge (in some cases, made from a piece of petiole) is used to split the fingers apart, nearly down to their base, leaving a fasicle of several leaflets. At this stage, small leaves or severely damaged leaves are culled.

The base of each fascicle is then trimmed off with a hatchet or machete. Once trimmed, individual blades are bundled, and left in a shady spot to cure further. These bundles are later opened, and individual blades flattened. Management of leaf moisture is very important throughout the process, as leaves which are either too dry or too wet are difficult to work, and may lead to a weaker shingle.

For the shingles themselves, leaves are folded in half over a bamboo splint (ពុះដើមឬស្សី) ​of about a meter long. They are added individually, so that each overlaps the next. The blades are then sewn to each other, using one row of stiching up near the bamboo splint. Finished shingles are then soaked in a pond for around 3 months– until they turn black. After soaking, they are dried, then washed and dried again. At this point, they may either be used for roof construction or stored in a shady spot until they are needed. As roofing material, they can last several years. Sewn, but unsoaked, shingles may be sold to itinerant merchants for about US$0.02. These are then sold in town. The child pictured here has since sold this batch and started another pile.

As I have noted before, I am a fan of fences. In agricultural landscapes, they have the obvious use of dividing land. However, these boundaries are not zero-dimensional lines on a map or scratched in the ground. They have their own niche within the landscape system, often different from the tracts which the divide. As such they sometimes play an important role in the ecology of the area as corridors, refuges, relicts and more.

This particular fence protects a garden plot, right next to someone’s house. The plot itself is not currently under cultivation, though it will be within the next few months. A few months after that, it will be under water as the annual floods come up. I thought that it was interesting more for its use as a drying rack.

The leaves in the foreground are used for smoking– you roll your tobacco in them, and it gives a particular flavor to the smoke. This style of smoking is popular among older men in the villages. The leaves are grown locally, while the tobacco usually comes from Kampong Cham Province. It is really strong stuff– I think that I would need at least 20 years of smoking practice before I build the necessary constitution for these guys. I was told that these particular leaves are from the ជើងចាប tree, which suggests that it might be Dasymaschalon lomentaceum Finet et Gagnep (Annonaceae). However, I need to get a good look at the tree before I can say that with any degree of certainty.

So, the other day I joined a team from the provincial agricultural department on a trip up to Prasat Balang District, northeast of town, in order to arrange an extension session on the improvement of watermelon production. Neither watermelons nor the rainfed production systems of that area are a real focus for me. However, I like farms, I like extension work and I like tasty, little Cambodian watermelons. And in this village, approximately 75% of households produce watermelon. I was pretty excited. This trip was to lay the ground work for an upcoming event, which would be attended by the Minister of Agriculture and a number of other dignitaries. We were planning to meet with the village headman (actually, headwoman in this case– not too common) and a crowd of farmers to feel out their interests and gather some information for the planning process.

Due to a scheduling snafu, we were stuck with several hours to kill before the appointed meeting time. Since we were not far from home when we discovered this, I thought that we would just go back and wait at the office (it has air conditioning and a TV). There was some debate, and then one of the guys came out with “I know someone over here who has some interesting mangos…”

Our next stop was the home of a family who indeed have some interesting mangos.

These guys are big– they come in at about 1 kg per fruit (that’s just shy of 2 and a quarter pounds back where I come from). If you look closely in the picture above, you will see one of the extension agents holding a fruit in his hand (second person from the left, black t-shirt). That will give you an idea of how big these things were. The farmers did not know the name of the variety. They just found them at the market in Kampong Thom town, and propagated the trees themselves. Though some from my party suspected that they were an Australian variety.

Mangos aside, they had a great little integrated system. In front of the house, the family was preparing rice-based liquor (in the past, deepwater rice has been important for alcohol production, but I am not sure what rice varieties they used, and whether or not they grew them themselves). After a batch is prepared, the remnants of the mash are brought back behind the house and used to feed the little crowd of pigs that live back there. The family had several low-roofed piggeries, with occupants segregated by age, and a massive boar tied to a post in a little wallow nearby. Their manure then went to fertilize mangos, papayas, bananas, limes, a patch of pineapples (pictured below) and probably a bunch of other things which I missed because I was totally distracted by the mangos.

We did not stay long, and I left their house with more questions than answers (hence my cursory description). I really hope to get back and interview this family sometime, just for fun. They have such an fascinating set-up.

In many ways, water can be seen as a crystallization point for the study of the social-ecological systems in Cambodia. Much of the country is dominated by the Tonle Sap and its surrounding floodplains– one of the most productive freshwater fisheries in the world, some of the most fertile agricultural land in the country and an unique ecological system which humans have been involved with for more than a millennium.

Water access remains a problem in much of the country, at least during certain times of year. As a result, Cambodia’s successive political structures have often left their marks on the landscape in the form of irrigation schemes, with varying degrees thoughtfulness, maintenance and functionality.

In a similar fashion, successive generations of scientists have attempted to analyze the relationships between people and water management. Since the French colonial period, archaeologists have devoted a great deal of time to trying to understand the sophisticated water storage and irrigation systems of the Angkor Complex. One such example, included in the full text of Etienne Aymonier’s 3 volume, “Le Cambodge,” is available page-by-page at the National Library of France (just search by author to find it, though I found the system is a little wonky; but, maybe that’s because my French is a little wonky). Such efforts continue with the work of The Greater Angkor Project, and others. Elsewhere in the country, the Lower Mekong Archeology Project (LOMAP) and others have sought to understand how the earliest complex polities in Southeast Asia arose. Pre-dating Angkor by hundreds of years, they may have arisen at the edges of the lower Mekong floodplain in southern Cambodia, and been connected by a sophisticated canal system. In a different vein, recent studies by the MRC/WUP-FIN project have focused on ecology, hydrological function and modeling of the Tonle Sap. Even my own work focuses on incremental landscape transformation by farmers, often for water management and rice production– micro-scale, multi-functional, flexible and dependent upon a sophisticated knowledge of their local environment.

And that is just a haphazard smattering of some of the work which has been done or is on-going. There are many more projects than I have mentioned or link to here. I lack the requisite number of fingers and toes to keep track of all of the individual researchers, consultants and international development projects involved in various aspects of water management and access. Though as an aside, I should credit LOMAP and WUP-FIN for been particularly conscientious about making their literature available on the web– and their sites would be a good start if you want to dig further into the scientific literature in the archaeological and ecological spheres, respectively.

Recently, the Documentation Center of Cambodia has published an article by Jeffrey Himel in their periodical, “Searching for the Truth,” which has made a welcome contribution to the understanding of the centrally-planned irrigation systems of the Khmer Rouge. I hope that he expands his analysis further, as many questions remain. According to the director of DC-Cam, Mr. Himel is the only researcher to have deeply explored KR irrigation using the primary materials held at DC-Cam (a resource I too plan to plumb). He remains a graduate student at Cornell, but has been on the Cambodian hydrology scene for a while, owning Aruna Technology, a remote sensing/GIS consulting firm in Phnom Penh.

Since this latest issue has yet to appear on the DC-Cam website, the blog Deathpower in Cambodia, has been thoughtful enough to re-print the article in full for those who do not have access to hard copies of DC-Cam’s periodicals. I will definitely be stopping by their office to pick up a copy. I hope it has pictures– KR irrigation followed a UTM grid lines, and should have a pretty characteristic look from aerial photography or satellite imagery.

I have heard that his presentations are very interesting, no doubt in part for their striking imagery. I dug around a little bit, and was able to find an abstract of a presentation he gave at the International Water History Association conference back in 2001…

21. Jeffrey Himel, USA,Cambodia (202)

Back to the Future – The Past and Present of Agricultural Water Control in Cambodia

The control of water has always been of critical importance to the Khmer civilization. It has been argued that the development of sophisticated irrigation systems led to the rise of the Angkor Empire that dominated much of mainland Southeast Asia from the 10^th to the 14^th Centuries. The massive development of irrigation systems by the Khmer Rouge regime during 1975-1979 seems to have had its basis in recapturing this ancient glory. But was this the case? There is growing evidence and opinion that the large tanks built by the Angkorian Kings and extensive network of manmade channels were not primarily made for irrigation.

If the “hydraulic city” so beloved of the French scholars did not provide irrigation water for triple cropping of rice, then how did the empire grow to such prominence and afford such a plethora of public works? Most have argued that the natural hydraulic regime allowed additional crops of floating and flood recession rice that provided a surplus to support the Kings, their cults, their temples and their armies. Yet these same cropping systems have existed throughout Khmer history and still persist today while Cambodia remains barely self-sufficient in rice production.

This paper offers an alternative theory. Aerial photography from the 1950’s shows how large areas above the lowlands had been carefully contoured for soil and water management for other crops. In addition, the large number of ponds suggest that the ancient Khmer were frequent bathers and had good sources of water supply throughout the year – this would have had a huge effect on the economy through improved health of people and their livestock. These lessons from the ancient Khmer could be usefully applied to the modern development of the country as it emerges from decades of conflict.

Check out his analysis at Deathpower. Clearly interesting material. I will be watching for more in the future…

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.