Red Sky

We’ve had a couple of dust storms over the last few days. The wind blows hard from the northwest and the air fills with a fine grit that you can feel in your eyes, throat, and deep down in your lungs. You can literally smell the dust in the air and taste it on your mouth. The sky takes on an a twilight pall like orange sherbet, the sun completely obscured. The dust finds it’s way through the crevices in our office tent and covers everything with a thin film that drifts thicker in the corners and the places we don’t walk. The dust holds in the heat, so even at 10 o’clock the other night, it was still well over 100 degrees.














View toward the helicopter LZ at FOB Kalsu during dust storm.
They call it "red sky" here. The helicopters don’t fly and the soldiers don’t like it because al Qaida uses the severe storms as cover to plant IEDs. Waleed, one of our BBAs (bi-lingual bicultural advisors), told me that the frequency of dust storms has increased in recent years and that it is unusual to have them at this time of year. Now we’ve had two in the last three days. There is some speculation that the lack of vegetative cover because of the dilapidated state of the irrigation system is a contributing factor. Others suggest this is another manifestation of global climate change. In any event, it is an interesting weather phenomenon, unusual to most of us and occasionally inconvenient those with travel plans. The other day I was able to get the last seat on a helicopter carrying the general in charge of British forces here to the Euphrates Fish Farm, one of the largest in Iraq. I was very excited to finally have the opportunity but my hopes were dashed when we were informed that a dust storm was on it’s way. Dang! Several on the team have come down with the "Kalsu Krud," a hacking cough deep in the chest and difficulty being able to speak. So far, so good for me, but I can definitely feel the effects on my breathing.

Today we presented our report to the base command and others. It was well-received and generated lots of interesting discussion about follow-up and implementation. For my part, I am pushing to get some new carp broodstock here from Hungary. I’ve initiated some contacts and hope to be able to follow through, perhaps with help with transport from the Army.

Tomorrow we move to FOB Endeavor in Najaf Province. Everyone here at FOB Kalsu and Babil Province has been great and very supportive of our work. Time is passing quickly and I hope to make the best of the time remaining.

Aquaculture Inside the Wire

I’ve been a bit frustrated over the last several days. Babylon is the province with the largest area of aquaculture ponds in the country, yet I’ve only seen two rather small fish farms (although these were very interesting to visit). The province also has two very large fish farms (each around 1,000 acres), neither of which I have seen or am likely to see. I’ve not seen any hatcheries or feed mills. Our schedule has been largely controlled by the military and the places we have visited have been pre-selected.

Much of what I have come to know about aquaculture has occurred “inside the wire,” on FOB Kalsu, the U.S. military base where we have been staying the last few days. Fortunately, I have been able to meet with a couple of really interesting and knowledgeable people to learn about aquaculture here.

A couple of days ago, Dr. Khalil I. Saleh from Musayyib Technical College came to the FOB to give the team a talk on aquaculture in Iraq. Dr. Saleh is a wiry, slightly-built man, extremely personable and engaging. His English is excellent and tinged with a distinct French accent no doubt picked up during his doctorate work at a university in Toulouse. I liked him right away, a fellow fish brother. We had a chance to chat during lunch and before his talk. I had so many questions to ask, which continued right up until the moment he had to leave.

Then, yesterday, I met with Duane Stone of INMA, which is part of USAID’s effort in agricultural development over here. Duane is a former Special Forces soldier and has experience working at a feed mill and a fish farm with catfish and tilapia in North Carolina. Duane has been working with one of the largest fish farms in the country, the Euphrates Fish Farm. (Incidentally, the “correct” pronunciation phonetically is Oi-fur-ot.) The Euphrates Fish Farm has about 1,000 water surface acres. The main production ponds are 100 acres each! Duane was working with the farm to produce fingerlings for distribution to farmers. At it’s peak the farm produced about 12 million fingerlings. Last year the farm produced 2 million fingerlings, which were distributed to about 100 farmers who had registered and become members of their local agricultural associations, which appear to be the main mechanism to transfer subsidies, technology, and information to farmers.

Aquaculture in Iraq includes several large-scale operations like Euphrates Fish Farm, but most farms are small. Overall, the average farm size in Iraq is about 20-30 dunam (1 dunam = 2,500 m2 = 0.62 acres). The average fish farm has about 1-5 ponds, each of which is about 1-5 dunam. Ponds are stocked at a low density (1 fish per 10-15 m2) because options to aerate ponds at higher fish densities are limited by the lack of consistent and reliable electrical power nationwide. The interesting thing about these family-scale ponds is the use of on-farm inputs such as barley and alfalfa as sources of nutrition for the fish. The interest in improving the quality of feeds for aquaculture in Iraq is keen. However, the country has no source of oil-seed meal, which would serve as the key source of protein in the diet. Most manufactured feeds are produced by dry extrusion, resulting in a sinking pellet with poor water stability. Most of the mills that produce feed are small by Western standards, but they are multi-purpose, producing feed for poultry too.

I just realized that I had not mentioned the species of fish that are grown! Common carp dominates, but the system also includes silver carp and grass carp, each at about 10% of the stocked population. Not a big carp fan here, but the market acceptance is good and ALL fish are marketed live. I visited with one fish seller in the market in Jabella and he sells between 50-100 kg of live fish every day, enough to make a decent living by current standards. Apparently the live fish market on River Road in Baghdad is something to see. Iraqis like to eat fish at least once a week, usually on Friday, but Wednesday is also a good day to eat carp.

There is a concerted effort to get fish farmers to register as official farms and to join their local agricultural association. The criteria to register as an official farm include:
1) siting ponds on reclaimed land,
2) siting ponds on land where soils are too saline for crop production, and
3) siting ponds where water use will not impact water for irrigation.
Basically this means that “official” fish farms should be located in marginal land, not suitable for crop production. Carp can tolerate the slightly saline water (3-4 ppt) that drains from irrigated fields. Soil salinization has been and continues to be a chronic problem with irrigated agriculture in a hot desert environment.

Did I say how hot it was today? Go pre-heat your oven to 450. Once pre-heated open the oven door and stick your face in the blast of heat. That’s what it was like today, for some reason much hotter than any day so far, somewhere in the upper 120s. Don’t know if I’ve ever experienced heat like that. It felt like my eyeballs were going to dry out and shrivel up. The breeze was biting. Yikes! Another day like this forecast for tomorrow.

More on aquaculture later, but thought I’d give a flavor of that here, especially b/c it’s the title of this blog.

A Visit with Sheik Jaffar

I thought I would have more time and opportunity to post to this blog but our schedule has been very demanding and connections to the Internet have been hit or miss. There’s already so much to say and I feel as though I’ve already fallen a bit behind. This is the prevailing sentiment among the team so our schedule today has now afforded us an opportunity to catch up on laundry, reports, and email.

I suppose the best way to describe what we’ve been doing is to go through the general approach. Each morning, usually before 0700 we receive a briefing on the day’s schedule from a lieutenant or sergeant, often from a Patrol Base located in the area we will be visiting. Although we are staying at a FOB (forward operating base), the Patrol Bases are even more forward. Everything is meticulously planned, scheduled, and coordinated. After the briefings we gear up with body armor and helmet and climb into the back of an MRAP (mine-resistant ambush protectant), the successor to the humvee. Most of the soldiers don’t like them, but they do get the job done when it comes to protecting against most IEDs. We leave the base in a convoy of about 6 MRAPs and 3 or 4 humvees and proceed to the day’s destinations. When we arrive at a destination the soldiers in the platoon will deploy to form a bubble around our group.

At this point we do our work: asking farmers about their issues, talking with the leaders of local agricultural associations, mayors, and sheiks who are working with Coalition Forces (the term used here). The key relationships seem to be between army captains and local leaders. In many cases, they have formed strong bonds of friendship that appear to be genuine, although no doubt there is also a price for that friendship.

Again, there’s so much to write about and the experience has been extremely rich and fulfilling so far, even though I've been here less than a week. It has also been extremely demanding mentally and physically, especially with the intense heat (yesterday afternoon 118 F) and having to wear body armor while we are out. I’d like to tell you about Sheik Jaffar, who lives in the village of Khidr in Babil Province. We visited him in an area where AQI (Al Qaida in Iraq) had been extremely active for quite some time. They essentially destroyed his entire village and nearly all structures in the surrounding area. A Shiite shrine of some local reknown was just a pile of bricks. We heard stories of AQI’s brutality and how they were finally driven out of the area. With incredible perseverance and dedication, and with the financial assistance of Coalition Forces, Sheik Jaffar is rebuilding his community. We saw a primary school that was nearing completion and several residences were rebuilt to the point that they were inhabitable.

Sheik Jaffar gave us a tour through his village and hosted us in his house. We sat in chairs along the wall of a large room; our team, some U.S. army officers, Sheik Jaffar and several of his sons, and other local sheiks and leaders. Sheik Jaffar is the chairman of the 13-member Board of Directors of the Al Izdihar Agricultural and Fisheries Association, which has 1600 members. Among other things, Sheik Jaffar is a fish farmer. I was fortunate to have the chance to sit with him for awhile and ask him about his own operation and about the constraints facing aquaculture in Iraq more broadly. We spoke in broad general terms about aquaculture in Iraq and prospects for further development in the area, for which he is very optimistic.

The highlight of this visit was the incredible feast that was laid our for us. Several of the sheik’s sons came into the room with blue folding metal tables and opened them up in one long line. The table was covered with a plastic tablecloth. Next, working down both sides of the table, individual loaves of flatbread were laid out. Then came the main course, about a half-dozen heaping platters of saffron rice with raisins, topped with sheep stew. Smaller dishes with tomatoes and cucumbers and more with pieces of flatbread soaking in pan drippings followed. We all stood around the table and ate. We had the option to eat with our hands or with spoons. Although my hand eating technique was a bit rusty, I soon got the hang of it again and enjoyed the savory meal immensely. After some mutual expressions of gratitude between our time leader and Sheik Jaffar following after-dinner tchai (tea), we returned to base. And this was my first day in the field!!

I want to finish this post by talking about some of the support people who are making this possible. To me, the translators attached to our group are absolutely critical to any potential "success" that will come out of our being here. Not only are they translators, but much more than that they are intepreters, both of what we ask and what is said to us. They are extremely knowledgeable about agriculture and development. They are committed to building a new Iraq and to doing so in alliance with Coalition Forces. I have enjoyed getting to know Dr. Fouad, "Dave," Waleed, and Adid over these last few days. We’ve talked about many things, some serious and some frivolous. I think they enjoy our company too (although they are distracted with some high-level soccer matches going on right now).

The other group I want to talk about are the men and women of the Army that have sheltered us on their bases, transported us to where we need to go, provided for our physical protection, and most importantly have done the kind of community development work that has allowed what we are doing to happen. I have been extremely impressed by the skills and professionalism of our troops. Everyone in the U.S. should be half as proud as I am of these young men and women. It has been an honor and a privilege to engage with them as they work to stabilize their areas of operation. From all the conversations I’ve had, it appears that the corner was turned about 8 months ago. Although many hot spots remain, the areas where we have been working have been very quiet since then. No doubt there are a lot of reasons for this, but primary among them has been the diligence and dedication of our front-line military, especially the sergeants, lieutenants, and captains who are engaging particular Iraqi leaders in particular communities and establishing the kind of relationship that can lead to stability and development. There is much to do here, but the potential is enormous.

The Veil of Dust

There was nothing to see out the plane window for the last couple of hours of the flight from DC to Kuwait, the ground hidden by dust. The late-afternoon light in Kuwait was a reddish haze. We were met by a representative of Gryphon air, the military contractor that flies in and out of Baghdad and got boarding passes with no problem. The gate was right in front of a food court featuring a McDonald’s and a Pizza Hut. The irony of Ronald McDonald facing our departure gate with a raised hand of farewell was not lost on me. The gate was full of contractors, many appearing to be ex-military (buzz cuts, burly builds) or young 30-something careerists working for the State Department in the Emerald City. I think I also saw Martha Raddatz from ABC news on the flight. We flew up over southern Iraq, obscured by a veil of dust, in the early evening twilight. We landed without too many evasive maneuvers and taxied past the civilian airport over to the military side. The scene on the tarmac was organized chaos with each passenger actually picking up their checked bags right there and meeting their liaisons. We were met by an army staff sergeant and a representative of our Team Borlaug and then proceeded past long lines of blast walls and check points to Camp Victory. It was weird seeing the military personnel out for a run, but wearing their weapons (a requirement). We had a nice meal in the “DFAC” and then got a quick tour of our compound, with instructions of what to do when the warning is given for an incoming round. (You’ve got about 10 seconds.) I’ve just finished adjusting my body armor and helmet. The weight will take some getting used to. Looks like we’re off to the south tomorrow to join up with the rest of the team. More then.