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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 Phnom Penh, I was lucky enough this year to be able to get in on the fun at the Royal Plowing Ceremony. I enjoy this particular ceremony. It is full of royal pomp, Brahmanist practice (harkening back to pre-Buddhist Khmerness) and of course, is focused on agriculture (plus, who can’t love fertility rituals?). In a nutshell (there’s much more to it than this): the King, or in this case his desigante (as the King himself is unmarried, and so cannot perform the ceremony), opens the planting season by plowing several furrows running around the field next to the royal palace. This year, the King’s designate was Prince Norodom Singharath, pictured above. Following this procession, one of the ox teams is offered a range of foods, in a row of golden bowls– sesame seeds, rice, beans, wine, grass, water and corn. Their behavior, what they choose and how much of it, is then interpreted by the royal Brahman priests in order to forcast the coming year (the Brahmans are on the left wearing white in the image below). This year, neither animal was particularly hungry. One ate 45% of the bowel of corn. The other refused to eat altogether. As I understand it, this suggests that corn yields will be fair. However, rice producers should be worred, as the team avoided eating any rice at all, which predicts a poor rice harvest. Likewise, neither drank any water. This predicts a dry year. So, the outlook is pretty negative, since the majority of Cambodia’s agriculture is based on rice. And much of that depends upon the rain.

Another thing that I find interesting about the Royal Plowing Cermony is that I keep getting my pocket picked there. In 2005, a girl tried to sneak my camera out of my pocket, but I interrupted her mid-sneak. This time, my ziploc bag of toilet paper was removed from my back pocket, despite it being securely buttoned in. I caught on quickly after it was gone, and recovered it from the ground next to me (beneath the feet of the guy who I think stole, then discarded, it). Then, not 10 minutes later, someone else tried the same thing. This time I was onto him before he got my pocket open. Interestingly, I had to nearly turn my entire body around to face him before he let go of my pocket flap (reminding me of a friend of mine, who caught someone picking his pocket, grabbed him by the shirt with both hands, and while he was administering the pre-beating cuss words, the slickster stole the watch right off of his wrist and then wriggled free). I am not surprised to have been targeted in that situation (a foreigner in a crowd of people, all craning their necks to see what the oxen are doing = easy pickins), and am not all that bent out of shape about it. I’d probably be more annoyed if they had actually found something valuable.

I think that over the course of my life, I have been the target of pickpockets 5 times– twice at bus stands in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and three times here at the Royal Plowing ceremony (almost 10 years living in New York City, and nothing has happened there, yet). I try to plan for such events, and I have been lucky. So no one has ever gotten anything more valuable than my stash of toilet paper (which they always seem to discard immediately, for some reason). And, I sort of appreciate the chance to analyze their tactics.

In retrospect, it is always pretty clear how they did it– what distractions they used, whether they were working in a group of not, and stuff like that. Sometimes it is pretty ingenious (in a slight of hand sense), like the one guy that was part of the chaos of a pre-dawn bus loading who pointed up at the top of the bus with one hand, yelling to his friends (seemingly involved in lashing down cargo), while at the same time discretely reaching with his other hand beneath his pointing arm (his hand concealed by his armpit) to get into my breast pocket as we passed each other shoulder to shoulder. I, of course, was distracted– looking up to see what he was yelling about. Others are not that ingenious, like the first guy today. He took advantage of people moving from the front of the crowd to the rear, to push me forward. I just thought he was a big jerk trying to get closer to the front. And that is what I was supposed to think, as all his pushing on my upper back distracted me from my behind, which was signalling an intrusion attempt which ultimately went unheeded.

I was not the only one targeted at the event. One young woman was taken away by the police when a middle-aged Khmer man caught her stealing his cell phone. He seemed more amused about it than anything, though she certainly was not. I believe that she was part of the team who made the second attempt on my toilet paper. So I must confess to having some satisfaction in her capture. However, I have never confronted anyone or called in the police when this sort of thing happens. I am never 100% confindent in my assessment of exactly who did it. The sneaky nature of the crime, and the anonymity of the crowd, makes it difficult to be certain enough to get all serious about things. Things certainly could have been worse– some of the government employees I know who came in from the countryside to work at the event that had their hotel rooms broken into. They lost money, cell phones, keys. That really stinks. One vowed never to return to the city again. I can’t say I blame him for feeling that way. But I’ll still probably turn out for the Royal Plowing Ceremony next time I am in town for it. Maybe I’ll even jump on the chance to gather more data, and put toilet paper in both my back pockets.

Above: packing up after the ceremony, the mobile traditional percussion unit is returned to the palace.

Across the street from the Moil Village Restaurant, outside of Phnom Penh on the road to Cheung Ek. 

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.