A chance to catch up with Hope Sakuma’s farmer field school and make new friends. We can see there’s good progress in clearing land ready for boli, bunds, rice paddy plots and a new corn field, leaving thickets of trees for shady shelter but removing old masenki palm and toothbrush trees.
Our new friends? Ibrahim and Med, proud owners of one (of only two) chainsaws in the Chiefdom. Now a fairly constant request from our farmers is for more chainsaws but we know that this will likely lead to some fairly indiscriminate tree-cutting and there's enough of that with illegal loggers.
So, project coordinator Amabest and Hassan have been talking to Ibrahim and Med and think that with some training, goggles and gloves and the introduction of a permission system to make sure our ancient forests can be protected and managed, owners of chainsaws might take on a new role becoming our forest rangers tasked with protecting the trees not just cutting them down and making sure landowners plant saplings for every tree they remove!
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