Fields of Teff, Part II

We planted those teff test plots way back in May, before taking our spring vacation. But first, there’s some back story. This mostly has to do with getting rid of fescue, the grass from hell. Fescue has its uses, but it’s not native and is considered an invasive in some contexts. And when you want to replace it, it’s almost impossible.

There’s so much I don’t know about this world we’ve entered. The things I know about responsibly managing a small Virginia farm could fill up a bucket, while the knowledge needed is more to scale with the Chesapeake Bay.

I have to confess I’m actually not very interested in plants. Once on a visit to Polyface Farm I heard Joel Salatin confess that plants baffle him, and I have to agree. I get along with animals better, but I thought I should try to learn a bit about crop farming if I wanted to do this.

Teff, kind of like asparagus (and by extrapolation I suppose kind of like any other grain or vegetable crop) does not grow well with fescue. Or any other weed. So what I’m learning about crop farming or vegetable farming is that weed eradication is of paramount importance.

You can get rid of weeds in one of two ways. You can spray, or you can plow. For the really tenacious stuff like fescue, both are recommended. This immediately throws up a moral dilemma for anyone wanting to farm organically or wanting to preserve topsoil and prevent erosion.

As Country Representatives for MCC in Ethiopia, we talked a lot about Conservation Agriculture. Our partners implemented CA projects that attracted the attention of both neighboring farmers, who would see the results and adopt the technology, and high-level government officials who promoted CA methods and technology country wide.

Very briefly, Conservation Agriculture promotes limited tillage (or plowing), inter-cropping, and mulch or cover crops so there is no bare soil. (“Like a respectable lady, soil should never be exposed.”) This greatly reduces erosion and improves soil fertility and crop yields.

Organic farming, of course, prohibits the use of spraying to kill weeds or pests. We’re not set on being an organic farm, but still value reducing harmful chemicals that can spill run-off into nearby waterways or kill helpful microorganisms–your livestock under the soil, as an Ethiopian CA specialist put it at a conference in Addis.

Therein lies the problem. You can’t grow crops with weeds (or fescue grass! Or Johnson grass!!), and if you can’t spray to kill it, you need to plow. Most farmers in the US will spray a field with a glyphosate spray like Roundup and drill seeds into the sprayed field to avoid breaking up the soil with a plow. If you plow, your fields are at risk of washing away in a spring storm, and in the sun all the moisture underground evaporates. And your livestock under there gets all plowed up and disorganized.

So what to do?

We knew it wasn’t ideal, but all our research on teff grass led us to the conclusion that we needed to both spray AND plow for the first season at least. There is no Roundup in Ethiopia, so the tradition there is to plow seven times. The theory is that the more energy and effort you put into the soil, the more it will reward you with a bountiful crop. A lot of MCC’s agricultural work was to convince farmers that they didn’t actually need to plow seven times. But teff does require some plowing to keep the weeds at bay.

For virtually ALL farmers in Ethiopia, this meant two oxen and a one-bottom plow. Teff feeds the entire population, and there is very little commercial farming of it. They plant at the beginning of the krempt rainy season, which is summer in the northern hemisphere. This photo was taken in June.

We didn’t want to plow up our field seven times, and were lacking the oxen to do it anyway. Our research, as well as a lengthy conversation with an Old Order Mennonite farmer David Showalter who was a walking encyclopedia (hard copy, not electronic) of knowledge about grains and grasses, led us to the inevitable use of glyphosate.

We bought a backpack sprayer and a knock-off brand of the dreaded Roundup. This was back in April when things were just beginning to grow. Ideally, we should have killed the grass in the fall, but we were a bit too far away and not really thinking about growing teff in the US at that point.

We probably didn’t need all that PPE, but we were kind of in the neighborhood anyway because of covid, so what the heck. I took my turn with the sprayer, settling into the hypnotic rhythm of the application. Pump, pump, spray. Step, step, spray. I could practically hear the little microbes–our livestock under the soil–wailing their tiny wails as they succumbed to the poison. And the grasshoppers and little bugs–wow. Made it all the way through winter, and now this?

After about a week the grass started to die, and you could actually see where Bruce had sprayed and where I had sprayed, one person’s work being a bit more wandering and erratic than the other one’s.

You can still see a bit of green where someone’s spraying wasn’t particularly even. Bruce followed up with a York rake and rototiller, just for good measure.

By now we had torn the heck out of that field, and probably were way ahead of the average Ethiopian farmer with his team of oxen. If Ethiopian logic held true, the enormous amount of energy we had put into the soil would be returned to us in luscious green teff, would it not?

We had four different varieties of teff we wanted to plant. We had smuggled two kinds out of Ethiopia, red teff from Dukem and white teff (Ethiopia’s preferred) from Gojam. We bought two more US breeds from the grass man, David Showalter. They were coated to make them easier to use in a seeder and to improve moisture and viability or something. We thought it would be a good experiment to see if the coated varieties outperformed the Ethiopian stuff. The US seeds were Tiffany and Moxie coated with something called Yellow Jacket.

I can’t justify how complicated it was for me to figure out how much teff we were supposed to plant in each of our test plots. We smuggled out 1 kg of each variety, red and white. Actually we didn’t really smuggle it out, just knew that it was illegal to bring teff out of the country but no one really cared about such a small amount. Upon leaving Ethiopia–“Hey, here’s some teff, do you care?” No, but what’s this gily knife from Afar doing in your luggage? Upon entering the US, “Hey, here’s some teff, do you care?” No, we’re used to Ethiopians bringing in suitcases full of spices and such. This doesn’t look like a big deal.

I’ve never been that great at maths (as they say in E. Africa) and wanted to know how big our test plots should be if we wanted to plant half a kilo of teff in each one. I started with what Sisay, the MCC Ethiopia agriculture guru told me: “the recommendation for teff is 15kg per hectare. 1 hectare is 10,000 meter square. So for half kg 333m square means about 11m X 30m.” I had to convert kilos to pounds to ounces and squared meters to yards to feet and then we didn’t have quite enough space for test plots that big so we cut it down some more and ended up with a tiny amount of teff, about a third of a pound for a plot 12′ x 120′ or 440 square feet.

We staked out our plots and laid down some drop clothes between the beds to avoid cross-pollination, since our idea was to find out what grew best and to keep this year’s crop for seed.

This is the yellow coated Moxie teff. Each grain is about twice as big as the normal teff seed.

By now, our energy inputs into this project probably outweighed the Ethiopian farmer’s in terms of field preparation and sewing. Sowing. (That was honestly unintentional.)

Feeling good about ourselves, we went on vacation.

When we got back we saw that yes!! The teff was up!

And promptly forgot about it with all the other things we were taking care of:

The cat.

A new pen for the quail.

Fifty turkeys–whose water leaked all over the garage floor yesterday morning, requiring a complete change of bedding.

Quail eggs.

Quail eggs, revisited.

A new fence for more goats.

The dead cherry tree that was in the way of the new fence.

And even a quick trip for me to New York City to visit my sister and my uncle.

So when I got back from New York (and from my first-ever Amtrak train ride!) we went out to look at the teff test plots.

This is not teff. (This is a grimace!) According to Picture This, the plant identifying app on my phone, this is a field of Pigweed. Careless weed. Redroot amaranth. Amaranthus retroflexus.

The grass in the foreground is a surviving patch of Ethiopian Dukem Red.

I think this counts as our first colossal farm failure.