The plot had been given up on: soil with nothing left to give, rainfall too unreliable to gamble a season on, and no infrastructure to carry water to it. Under those conditions a farmer's rational choice is to farm somewhere else — which is exactly how land gets abandoned and stays abandoned.
It is not an isolated case. Large areas across the region were degraded by deforestation, by years of intensive mono-cropping, or by a combination of the two, and now sit idle.
We established a smallholder farm on the site and fitted solar-powered irrigation to take the rainfall gamble out of the first seasons. The plot is run as a working farm rather than a demonstration plot — the measurements only mean something if the farm has to earn its keep.
It does two jobs at once. It lets us test which crop composition actually performs on ground like this, and it gives the local chiefs and the council something they can walk onto and see: proof of what the many abandoned, degraded areas across the region could still produce.
