Who Needs Michigan Leaves? I’ve Got COTTON!

Ok so that’s a total lie… nothing can replace the sensation of raking leaves all morning just to create a massive pile and jump in it (or maybe snow is more accurate at this point). But I have to admit, when I saw the piles of cotton recently gathered in my village for our cotton harvest, all I wanted to do was jump!

 

Add cotton to the list of things about which I had no idea how it grew. When I saw my first cotton plant I was expecting lots of sharp thorns, but instead I saw beautiful flowers and these funny pod looking things that eventually open up to reveal bunches of cotton.

A cotton bud

Once all of the cotton had been harvested, the cotton company in my region, SODEFITEX, came to weigh the harvest and truck it away. The entire process took about 4 days. It was a whole village activity – men loading up horse carts all across the village and driving them to the weighing location. 

Using a mosquito net to cart cotton - this man got a stern talking to haha

Each household then just dumped their cotton in a pile, and somehow everyone knew which pile belonged to whom. It was definitely one of those organized chaos things…

The cotton is then loaded into these large sheets and brought to the scale. Once weighed, all of the cotton is loaded into a truck and driven away.

              

A new social hangout

My host family is actually one of the few in the village that does not grow cotton. When I asked my host dad about this, it turns out he has very strong feelings. He said that the company sells the farmers the cotton seed and fertilizer to grow the crop, but doesn’t give the price of those items until they come back to actually collect the harvest. At that point, they weigh the cotton, subtract the cost of all the items they provided the farmer and then give out the farmer’s profit. According to my host dad, it’s a lot of work for not a lot of payout. That being said, it is one of the main crops we grow. I didn’t help with the harvest like I did with the peanuts, so I’ve got something to look forward to next year!

This is too funny - just wait for it!

Happy Valentine’s Day to you all! My valentines (Mom & Dad) are on their way right NOW! Stay tuned :)

Thanks for reading. Peace & love,

Lindsay

Mr Peanut’s Got Nothin’ On Us

I’ve never lived in a community whose main livelihood is farming or agriculture related. Besides picking out good-looking produce in the grocery store, my knowledge pretty much extends to the mid-western corn adage of “Knee-high by the 4^th of July”…

What I’ve come to realize is, that as consumers of a lot of processed goods, we sometimes lose sight of what our food looks like in its original form. I’ve been embarrassed by this a few times as people in my village were shocked when I learned how peanuts grew.

When rainy season came to a close here in mid-November, our harvest went into full swing. It took a lot of time to prepare the crops in the fields, but then cartloads of food started appearing in our compound.

Millet is one of the main crops we consume, along with corn, peanuts and sorghum.

Millet stalks growing in our fields

The millet gets cut off the stalk and then left to dry in the fields before it is brought in. But man do we have a lot of millet – an entire hut dedicated to millet storage in fact!

MILLET

Preparing to store the millet (it's all in that hut now!)

Peanuts are really what Senegal is known for in terms of farming, and I have to admit, I’ve eaten a lot of peanuts and just never knew…peanuts grow under the ground!!! When the peanuts were finally ready to be harvested, it was like a party in the fields. My counterpart rallied a bunch of people to come and pick peanuts, and as his kids brought peanut plants in from the fields and dumped them in a large pile, we sat around and pulled the peanuts off. I lasted about 4 hours before calling it quits, but this process went on for days! (Other people wait for the plants to dry out and beat the peanuts off the end with these hook-looking things).

Carrying in the peanut crop

Group Peanut Harvest!

However, the peanut harvest doesn’t end there. When the peanut plants are pulled from the ground, a lot of peanuts get left behind in the dirt. As the dirt dries out with dry season, women then go into the fields and literally “find peanuts” for hours. When they called it that I just thought my Pulaar translation was off, but it’s exactly as it sounds – finding peanuts.

How many peanuts can you see in this picture? Kinda like one of those Guidepost for Kids activities..

COUNT EM'

I spent a few good mornings searching for peanuts while listening to NPR podcasts!

Our peanut field fit for "finding" missions

The fun doesn’t stop there! While some peanuts are sold or left in shell form for later use, others are turned into peanut butter. In order to make PB you need quite  a few peanuts, and thus enters this grinding type machine we used to break all the peanuts free from the shell – I seemed to excel at this particular task.

Then the peanuts get toasted over a hot fire (this can take HOURS depending on how many peanuts you are toasting) and dumped out to cool. 

Dumping out the peanuts to cool

You can actually hear the crackle. Mmmm

Finally, they are taken to a special grinding machine in Tamba and turned into buckets of peanut butter, one of the main ingredients in a lot of sauces we eat here.

All in all, I’ve developed a strong appreciation for trying to know what my food looks like when it is originally being grown. I am so removed from the growing process most of the time that I didn’t even know how a common food looked when it was in its natural state. Food for thought.

Part 2 Coming Soon – The Cotton Harvest

Thanks for reading. Peace & love,

Lindsay