Soil & Relationships - Farming Together

 

The Nigerian flag: Green, White and Green.

The basis of peace is flourishing agriculture.

We have allowed foreign cash crops to flood our nation, debilitating local production.

We have allowed foreign artificial chemicals to debilitate our soils.

These chemicals ruin our topsoil, bringing erosion and washing poisons into our water ways.

They kill our insect life, which is essential to our environment, building our plant and animals’ welfare.

In short, our agricultural dollar has gone abroad and not into our local communities.

 Farming with a dependence on artificial chemicals has turned us away from community and turned us to individualism. We cannot build a nation of unity and peace on individualism.

 

Biodiversity

Building health into our soils

Into our animals and farming crops 

Into our bodies

Reducing diseases like hypertension, diabetes and cancer.

 

Examples at Wurin Alheri

Our maize crop: increased 100-fold, costs plummeted.

Our pigs farming: reduced costs, disease and high output of compost. 

Our fish and fruit trees: no disease or insect plagues

 

Students at work on CFM maize farm

We have been feeding the plant with artificial chemicals. We should be feeding our soil with real biodiversity, with real food. Building our soil’s wealth is building our community’s wealth.

 

Biodiversity Builds Peace

When we build relationships with our neighbours, we serve each other in farming. We have a mutual benefit. Our soils recover. Our wealth recovers. Our levels of conflict and banditry reduce.

 At Wurin Alheri we have Hausa people cutting our grass, which we can share with local cows, as they manure and urinate on our soils, which brings miraculous recovery to our soils, to bring us together in relationships.

 

A picture of Hausa men cutting grass for CFM

Don’t run away from today’s problems to “save yourself”, which destroys our relationships. Bring the solution to Nigeria, by changing how we behave, drawing ourselves together to heal our land, our soils and our souls.

 

Our souls heal in peace, not in violence.

Prof. Kent Hodge