FEATURED: A FARMER AND HER BIOGAS PLANT

Why a Single Farmer Invests in Technology

During a project visit to Hadush Adi in northern Ethiopia I met Mebrat. This is not her real name, which the farmer did not really want to tell me. But she told me her age, and I was allowed to photograph them: Mebrat is 49, a widow and the mother of two children. An impressive woman because she has visibly improved the life of her family by her openness to new things and the courage to invest.

Mebrat's homestead consists of a tidy one-room round building, typical in rural Ethiopia. Here they cook, eat and sleep. A wall of stones surrounds the courtyard and the house. Next to the living area there is a shed, the chicken coop. In the shade of a tree, a cow and two sheep chew freshly cut grass. Mebrat's son is busy mixing manure with his bare hands in a pot of water used for the biogas plant.

The farmer brought me a glass of homemade sheep’s yogurt and explained about her small plant. She has built it with the support of the regional biogas program in the province. The mixed dung flows into a tank from the pot, which is hidden under a concrete slab in the ground. There it ferments and forms gas. This is led to the house by a cable - the family can cook with it, and in the evening gas lamps illuminate the living room. 

The biogas plant has changed the life of the family. Since they no longer cook with wood or cow dung on an open fire, the walls are no longer sooty. Mebrat's cough has subsided. In the evening, she and her family can read and talk here, when it is dark at six o'clock. The two children are particularly benefiting from this: Mebrat's daughter (15), who is still at school, and the son (18), who studied electrical engineering at university. Light makes life safer - and especially for women-led households which an important point.

In addition, the animal dung, which had previously been burnt over the stove fire, becomes a good fertilizer by fermentation in the biogas plant. The family composts it with green waste and later works it into the field. Mebrat finds with "Bioslurry" their crops grow better. This is also the opinion of the GIZ's "Sustainable Soil Fertility Management" (ISFM) project. Together with the farmers and Ethiopian partners, they test methods for improved cultivation in this area.

A new method consists in the simultaneous use of "bioslurry" as high-quality organic fertilizer, with quality seed, multi-fertilizers and row sowing. The aim is to maintain soil fertility and to increase crops through sustainable soil management. "We support people like this farmer who wants to try out new techniques and thereby become the model for others," says ISFM project co-worker Belay Tadesse.

And yet Mebrat's decision was not easy. After she had learned at an event that there are such facilities and how they work, she was thrilled. However, material and labor for the construction of the plant cost 12,000 Ethiopian Birr - that is 77 percent of an average annual income in Ethiopia. Mebrat had never taken a loan in her life, and it was to stay that way. That is why, one day, she tied the only ox of the family, a strong, powerful animal, to a rope, and sold it to the market in the town of Axum. A big step, because the ox was a kind of life insurance for the family - if things got hard, if someone got sick or married, she could sell him and make some money. Moreover, the reputation of a family in Ethiopia is traditionally measured by the amount of cattle held. 

"It was the right decision," she says today, and her children nod. Since July 2016, Mebrat is now the first farmer in her municipality with a biogas plant and uses the "Bioslurry" to improve the soil." The first neighbors were already there and they showed them everything," she says grinning.