Research

Before we came, the women were hand-watering garden plots, which is very labor intensive — they can all dead-lift a 40-pound water bucket onto their head without spilling a drop. Most of these villages do rain-fed agriculture: The women grow the vegetables and the men the staples and cash crops. But their production is limited to the rainy time of year, a few short months. In Benin, community members thought their area would be a good place for solar power, and approached a U.S.-based NGO (the Solar Electric Light Fund) for help. 

SELF helped two villages install solar-powered water pumps, reservoir towers and drip irrigation. These systems don’t store rainwater; they pump ground or surface water during dry periods. The systems are passively regulating; they don’t have any batteries or tracking devices or energy storage, other than in the height of the water tower. If you design it right, you get more water pumped on the hot, dry days, when you need more water, and less on the cooler, cloudier days. The system allows them to grow vegetables year round, which certainly wasn’t happening before.

A whole host of things at the garden level, from types of crops to how much was being sold versus consumed at home, how much water was being pumped every day, how well the system was performing. At the same time, we did detailed household surveys both before and after a year of use of the system, with both the women’s group using the system, and also with households that didn’t have a member using the system. Then we also surveyed control villages, and a women’s group that was doing traditional hand-watered gardens. In the end, we were able to compare both between, and within, village effects, and really tease out how much of any change was actually due to this solar system.

Even after one year, the households using this technology were doing much better, in terms of welfare benefits, than the control households. At the beginning, a lot of the (money) was going towards meeting basic needs, but later households started making longer-term investments, such as planning to pay school fees with their earnings, or starting new side businesses. 

This is nice mitigation technology, as the alternative would be using a diesel- or gas-powered pump that produces emissions. If one were to create the same garden but with a liquid fuel pump, the motor would emit around 0.8 tons of carbon per year. So, each one of these village-scale gardens is actually offsetting that much carbon. In terms of adaptation, climate models project negative impacts on the yields of staple crops in places like Benin. We worry that these small land holders, who have no buffer against weather shock, may be some of the hardest and earliest hit. So shifting into year-round production, which doesn’t require a ton more land, may be a really important adaptation strategy for these farmers.

One day I was about to go home for the night when the president of this women’s farmers group, Ganni Yarou, said, "No, you can’t leave yet, I am making you pounded yams." This is a local special meal, like mashed potatoes. I mumbled the usual niceties: "Oh, that’s really sweet, but you don’t have to do that." She said "SIT DOWN, you have been here working to make sure that me and my family have enough to eat, and this whole time I haven’t been able to buy you food, and now that I can, damn it, I am going to feed you."  This was really touching and, of course, delicious.

Modern agriculture gets a bad rap for, in very simplistic terms, burning so much oil to make fertilizers and chemicals, and then dumping them into the ground. People think we should use less intensive methods of production. I remember an "aha" moment, though, when I was running calculations with some colleagues on agricultural emissions. We were looking at what kinds of production systems generate what kind of climate impacts. It turns out that the greenhouse impacts of converting everything to organic agriculture would swamp the impacts of producing and using lots of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The land expansion necessary to support less intensive agriculture dwarfs everything else. Historically, the biggest agricultural contribution to climate change is from converting native habitat to cropland. This doesn’t let Big Ag off the hook, as there are other environmental impacts. Nor does it mean organic is bad. It simply means that high yield has been important from a climate perspective historically. If we had stayed low yield, we would have had a warmer planet.

It’s important to parse out the energy details, which is what I like to do. Coming up with these kinds of numbers helps bring nuance to our climate change discussions. It helps ratchet down the crazy, either/or rhetoric about genetically modified crops and Big Ag and fuel consumption. Sure, we can grow more wheat in Canada and keep up U.S. production and ship this food everywhere, but it’s not without a cost. Recent research suggests that if northern production made up for southern losses out to mid-century, trade of food would increase by something like 30 percent. This is not at all trivial if you think about the emissions associated with transporting that amount of food. We need to keep quantifying these costs for people, and helping them understand the nuances. That’s my tactic.