All of his neighbors have dusty, unproductive land, but Victor Beltran has a field of maize over five feet high and another of sorghum swaying in the breeze. In the distance, a farm worker is preparing an area for beans.
In the 60 years he has been here, Beltran has never seen his farm like this – for very good reasons. Each year in Nicaragua, a punishing dry season makes the rivers run dry and crops fail. But during the country’s equally intense rainy season, when there is plenty of water, the skies are so dark there is barely enough sunlight to grow food.
The country’s many subsistence farmers have no option than to plant when there is water, and accept the poor yields that result. No one plants during the dry season – except Beltran.
A year ago Beltran volunteered to be part of a pilot project that takes the concept of water harvesting to a new level. Rather than simply collecting rainwater in buckets or tanks, the project makes use of the region’s hilly topography in the construction of whole reservoirs to collect and store rainwater.
Two steep-sided, interlocking hills that mark the boundary of Beltran’s land provide a perfect natural catchment area for excess rain during the wet season. A bulldozer, used to build a sturdy dam, compacted the earth on the reservoir floor to provide a natural seal.
Then all Beltran had to do was wait for the rain.
Now, when he opens the tap at the base of the dam, fresh water gushes out into a narrow gulley, and is transported to drip irrigation pipes in his fields. This is the first time he has ever used irrigation and he’s expecting a bumper harvest.
The combination of ample sunlight and abundant water has created the ideal conditions for food production. With a guaranteed source of water, Beltran is willing to take a gamble, and invest in much-needed fertilizer too. He is also stocking the reservoir with fish, as an additional source of protein and income.
The reservoir at Beltran’s farm is one of a number of pilot projects currently underway in Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Mexico supported by the Latin American Fund for Irrigated Rice (FLAR) and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), and financed by the Common Fund for Commodities (CFC). The projects follow in the footsteps of schemes in Brazil and Uruguay in the 1980s, which used similar water harvesting techniques to transform those countries into significant rice exporters.
The CIAT-FLAR project is finding ways of spreading the technology to smallholder farmers elsewhere – and not just for growing rice, but almost any other crop. One of Beltran’s neighbors now would like to grow watermelons.
The above AlertNet story was written by Neil Palmer, a communications officer at CIAT in Colombia