9UNP0342SD_Josh_Posner_WordPress

- Kevin Check: Good afternoon. My name is Kevin Check, from the Wisconsin Alumni Association. Welcome to today's Global Hot Spots lecture, "Natural Resource Management in the Andes, Using Science to Address Environmental and Livelihood Issues." For the past 20 years, the research program of Josh Posner, Professor of Agronomy, has been focused at the interface of farming strategies and natural resource conservation. Internationally, his work has focused on steep sloped production systems, primarily in the high Andes. In this arena, larger scale environmental impacts resulting from farming systems have been studied. Specifically, he has worked on upper watershed management for improved stream flow and grassland management for biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration. In a new initiative, he is developing a partnership with four Chinese Academy of Science Institutes in southwest China to study biodiversity conservation and sustainable livelihoods. With that, let me introduce today's speaker, Professor Josh Posner. 
(applause)

- Okay, good. Well, good afternoon, everybody. My name is Josh Posner. And I'm in the agronomy department. And my presentation is about the Andes. Not as much of a hot spot as perhaps Iran, and some of the speakers who will follow. But I guess I hope you'll enjoy learning a little bit about some of the work we do with our Latino colleagues in the High Andes. It's very interesting, because many of you are aware that about two weeks ago, Norman Borlaug passed away. 

Norman Borlaug was a plant pathologist and plant breeder, a professor in Minnesota. And he was one of the first scientists to go with the Rockefeller Foundation down to Mexico and began doing research on wheat. And I think you know that today, what evolved from that work in the early '50s, well, middle '50s, was what we call the green revolution. And I think it's pertinent because the science that he worked on produced a lot of wheat. Other people did different crops, with rice and corn. I think you all know a little bit about the story. But his lasting legacy in a way, and today maybe it looks almost childish, but was that he taught us all that you can really apply good science to very difficult problems in another culture, in a different place, and have impact. I think that you can imagine that in the late '50s, it was quite courageous to leave St. Paul and go to Mexico City, and then go up into the wheat growing areas, and have the audacity to think you could actually change wheat production, not only in Mexico, but ultimately in the whole world by applying the same research techniques that we were using at the time here in the upper Midwest, or in Europe. And so, I think that's one of his most lasting legacies. 

Those of you that were at the Michael Pollan lecture last night, one of the 7,000 of us, I hope some of you were there. It really was, I thought, an excellent presentation. And he had a question-- People were allowed to send in questions. And one was about what did he think of Norman Borlaug, the green revolution, the high input agriculture. You can imagine that the question was meant to elicit maybe a bit of a reaction from Mr. Pollan. And I thought he answered it quite well. I think back in the late '50s and '60s, we didn't think too much about running out of petroleum based products, like nitrogen. And for him to do good science and develop highly, highly productive systems that used nitrogen, it's a bit hindsight to criticize today, the green revolution that was developed, the short-statured varieties. The issue, for those of you who don't know, was that traditional varieties of corn, rice and wheat, when they're heavily fertilized, instead of producing more yield, they grow taller and large, and you actually get less yield and have tremendous difficulty in harvesting. 

So the work that they did was to develop disease tolerant varieties, varieties that when they got more nutrition, instead of getting taller, put up more heads, tillered more, in the case of wheat and rice. Anyway, I thought that Mr. Pollan answered quite well. And he said this is a great scientist who made an incredible impact. And no, he doesn't think that the technology based on high petroleum inputs is the right thing to be promoting, say, in Sub Saharan Africa. And so, I think his point there is just that we know that fertilizer prices are going to keep rising. We need to develop other ways, more based on organic matter management in Africa. As many of you might know, in Sub Saharan Africa, transportation has a whole slough of problems that make it more difficult to imagine a high input agriculture really taking off. And it seemed much more likely to use local resources. And so, I'm digressing even before I start. 

But I just wanted to say that we lost a wonderful and important scientist, who I think is, because my topic is about applying science to the agricultural systems in the high Andes, and in a way, I got into agriculture because Norman Borlaug was, at that time, winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his work. I mentioned Michael Pollan. He was here last night. He's here again today. And I only mention that because he's giving a debate and presentation just a hundred yards up the road at the Memorial Union Theater at 3:30. So some of you who may have found a place to park, can go over to the Union and have a beer, and then I think you'd enjoy hearing Michael Pollan. I wonder if we need to turn down the lights? No, sorry. Bad idea. Maybe I'm so close to it, I'm having a hard time seeing it. 

What I'd like to talk to you then about is Natural Resource Management in the Andes: Using Science to Address Environmental and Livelihood Issues. So, I'd like to talk a little about the organization that I used to be the director of, before I returned to campus, the Consortium for the Sustainable Development of the Andean Ecoregion. These are young girls in Ecuador at school, waiting for their school lunch. And we are a consortium of NGOs, universities, individuals, that are trying to-- Our focus is at the interface. As Kevin mentioned, this is sort of where I like to work, between the management of natural resources, and you can imagine the situation is fairly fragile on the steep slope, higher elevation mountains in the Andes, or the Himalayas. Our focus is to not only maintain the resource base, but to try to improve rural incomes. And our third issue is equity. If you raise incomes, whose incomes are you raising? So we like to consider our consortium and the Condesan is a consortium for sustainable development in the Andean Ecoregion. The way we worked as a group as we had these pilot sites. 

The countries that are members are Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. So these are some of the cities that the work I'm about to describe. Lima is the capital. That was just to orient you. We didn't work in Lima. But when we get in the high hill mountains in Peru for example. We didn't work in Quito. We worked in the town of -- So, just for those you that haven't had the pleasure of working and knowing the Andes. In very broad strokes, we kind of think of three Andes. The Green Andes are from about the northern part of Peru, through Venezuela. 

These are higher rainfall, the Green Andes. As you come through most of Peru, and down on the eastern side, the Amazonian side of the Andes in Bolivia, we call them the Yellow Andes. These are the Andes that are much higher risk, semi-arid. And the big cities in that zone are generally in the irrigated valleys. That's where the Spanish came and set up. And the third important part of the Andes is here, called the High-Risk Andes. This is the Altiplano, the high plains. It's about a hundred miles wide, 300 miles long. Lake Titicaca is in the Andes, this high plateau. And here, you've kind of got the double whammy of it's not high rainfall, and almost any night of the year, you can have frost. 

And so, it's the livestock based, grazing systems. Again, just to give you, this is a cross section, say, of some place in Bolivia, where in the high Altiplano, some of you know of quinoa, maybe you've bought it in health food stores. Quinoa is a weed. I found it funny when I came back and showed pictures of quinoa and talked about our project to improve the productivity of quinoa, when we were based in Bolivia at the Bolivian Research Service, because it's lambs quarters. It's a weed here, and people don't particularly like to imagine that we're trying to make the seeds even bigger. But it's an important food in the High Andes. Tarwi is a legume. Barley was actually introduced by the Europeans, but a very important crop, because if you're lucky and you don't get hit by a frost, you can take it all the way to grain. But if you do get hit by a frost and lose the crop, you at least have good forage for your livestock. Bitter potatoes. 

Sheep, of course, come from Europe, I mean from the Spanish to the New World. And Llamas. Then as you sort of go over, maybe, the snow covered peaks and come on down, you hit the temperate valleys where you have an agriculture, that because of elevation, is not that different from maybe even Wisconsin, which we have by latitude. Potatoes. We can grow alfalfa there. But potatoes, wheat, peas, and a lot of dairy. We come down again, and we have more the zone for corn and grain legumes like soybeans, or different kinds of beans. And then in the case of Bolivia, we move into a zone called the Yungas or Chapare. These are two different areas that are maybe sometimes in the news, because part of the way the Indians dealt with the harsh climate in the higher elevations, is somewhat like Wisconsin farmers dealt with the harsh life of being a dairyman and having to wake up at 4:30 in the winter and go milk the cows, so you chewed tobacco. The Indians chewed cocoa leaves. 

This is the cocoa production area, which is so much in the news, because a country like Bolivia has the problem of some cocoa production is legitimate, and a lot of production is not legal, because it's mainly to be made into cocaine paste and shipped out. The genius of the Incas at their height was they had a different vision of farming systems. They tried to make sure that there were villages in each of these ecological floors. Relatives would have relatives, so that they could exchange. So at the very highest elevations, they had the llamas. They had a lot of salt lakes. When they grew potatoes, they got very poor yields, but because there were no insects, their potatoes were virus-free. And they would do business with their cousins, who were at the next elevation down, who could get much bigger yields of potatoes, but every five years, needed to go back up the mountain to get fresh seed. And obviously, they needed salt. And at the lowest levels here, I forgot to mention, but they have tobacco and cocoa. 

But there was a system here that was totally different than say, the European system, any other system that we've ever seen, where they managed the heterogeneity of their environment by this idea of controlling small sections by the same group of people at different elevations. And not surprisingly, they were great road builders. So this is the background. What I'd like to do now is talk to you about four examples of this bringing science to bear on natural resource management, improving livelihoods. And so, I want to talk about an experience we had in our consortium about coffee. You may be aware that price, even though it's not obvious from Starbucks, the world price of coffee is way down. People who grow coffee for a living are having a very hard time of it. You know, the gourmet coffee shops, I know the prices haven't reflected the fact that the one ingredient is a heck of a lot cheaper now than it was, relatively, ten years ago. Low coffee prices have obliged farmers to get out of coffee and get into livestock. The grasslands that they plant, instead of having coffee trees is actually a good thing from the point of view of erosion. 

But it's a very bad thing from the point of view of employment. It takes a heck of a lot more people to handle a hectare of coffee trees, an acre of coffee trees, than it does an acre of pasture. And I'd like to talk a little about that, some work we did with soil conservation in Peru. A program we had to bring to people's attention the use and misuse of pesticides in potatoes in Ecuador. And then the final one, also a Peruvian example of watershed, participatory watershed planning, and a little bit of how we brought some science to that issue in an effort to ultimately improve livelihood and attract capital to these hill farmers. So here's the issue, low coffee prices in Colombia resulted in a shift to livestock production. This has resulted in something good. In the area we were working in, there's a huge hydro-electric plant at the bottom of this watershed. And so, of course, that's kind of good news for them. But it also had a very negative effect on employment. 

So, you know, here's the hillsides of Colombia. This happens to be sun grown coffee. I think you're aware that sometimes coffee, at least traditionally, coffee was grown under shade. It was less productive, but many people would argue it has a better taste. But it can be grown in full sun, like this example. Well, as the price of coffee continues to drop, Vietnam was trying to get its economy going, so in the 1980s and '90s, the increase in coffee production in Vietnam was just skyrocketing, flooding the market with coffee, and world prices dropped. This isn't the same picture, but I wanted to show you that same landscape now in pasture, for raising primarily beef cattle. The problem is, let's see-- These two graphs, what I wanted to show here is as you have less and less coffee, you have less and less employment. But as you replace trees with grass in this environment, you actually reduce erosion. So you see that having-- This is a modeling exercise we did. 

And what we did, is we kept pulling out acres of coffee trees and putting in acres of pasture, but using an average employment rate that an acre of coffee would produce, and that lost employment by having an acre of pasture. We come out with dropping the amount of jobs for people, day labor, for people in the coffee zone. And we actually improve, we have have less and less soil moving down to the hydro-electric plant. And these are two sub-watersheds. We developed this data, this model and the data, so we could go down to the watershed, down to the dam, down to where the people are running the water through a hydro-electric to produce electricity to sell to Bogota. And of course, they at first flush, would say this is actually good news, because we're having cleaner water come down. We have less trouble with our turbines. This is a good thing. Well, we argued with them that, you know, that they really needed to think about the fact that this change in land use was having a very adverse effect on the quality of life, the income of the people that were living in the watershed. And what we developed, and I'll bring the dam back in in a moment, is another high value crop, I shouldn't say another, but a high value crop that could replace the coffee, and certainly replace the pasture. 

And our challenge was to find something that would be of value, that people would want to, obviously, market, and something that would take a lot of labor. So, sometimes, that's just the opposite way an entrepreneur thinks, because labor is hard to handle, so you'd much rather mechanize the thing. The great thing that those of you who know about Black Raspberries, is they're thorny as the dickens. You've got to harvest them by hand. It's not that pleasant. In fact, in that climate, you have to harvest about twice a week to get the ripe berries. And so, this is a system that we found that if we built little terraces, here's the Black Raspberries in between. We built little terraces. Our measurements showed that we were not provoking much more erosion than the pasture. The pasture was the best. 

We were doing just as well as the coffee trees that used to be there. But we were creating a lot of work. And so, we ended up getting as many, in this first effort that I'm talking about 100 hectares. One of the interesting things about the Colombians is their local fruit drinks outsell Coca-Cola, outsell Pepsi Cola; outsell Fanta. Colombians like to drink fruit juice. There was a big local company that was interested in buying our berries. And we were able to work with the dam below to have them help us market, because obviously, each individual couldn't market a couple of pints of Black Raspberries every, you know, two or three times a week. We needed to have a collection system, a storage. We needed to have a truck to take it down to where it could get to the processing plant to be made into a drink. And as a result, we got the dam to kind of work with our association of farmers to move out of, you know, to go from coffee to pasture, and then back into, in this case, Black Raspberries. 

A second example is some work we did in Peru looking at the problem of soil erosion. These white spots are actually tilled fields, many of them are in wheat. But this is what the landscape looks like, and of course, a bit different than Wisconsin. And so, we were trying to work with farmers there. And this is what these slopes look like. And it knocks your socks off. It takes your breath away, too. To watch these guys work, they work as a team. They do a lot of sharing of labor. You know, we'll work on your farm and your job is to just give us lunch. 

And the number of days we work on your farm, you've got to spend on everybody else's farm to get the job done. And one of the things that I found interesting, when I first arrived, is this is a second scene. That's in Peru. This is Ecuador. You look at that, and you know, it's always a good check if you're into farming systems, if something really seems stupid, you probably don't understand it, because there's not a lot of farmers who are still in business that are really stupid. But obviously, these fields going up and down the slope seems a bit counterintuitive, why the heck didn't they do it on a contour, right? I mean, let's be reasonable here. Everybody knows water flows downhill, and contours would be better. You know, a little bit of western Wisconsin, you've seen how pretty that looks, with the contours of corn and alfalfa. Well, the answer is quite interesting. 

It's that as the young men and women, and particularly the young men move off the farm, the older family members have less labor. And in an effort to help agriculture, there were a lot of gifts from US AID and others, of tractors. And the thing that's interesting about a tractor, if you've driven one, is you really don't want to across this slope. You will flip. You will maybe hurt yourself, maybe kill yourself. But you will flip, because you can't have two wheels so much lower than the other upper wheels. So the way you till fields like that with a tractor is you go up the slope, probably with the disk up, because you don't have enough power to disk the soil at the same time you're going up that slope. Then you come down with the disk in, and you've got gravity, everything working with you. So if you can imagine, it just seems so interesting that things are the exact opposite of what you might expect, because maybe with tractors, you'd think they have more options. But in fact, it's locked them into this up and down planting. 

Okay, so here are some more pictures of other slopes. Here are some wheat fields. Here, obviously, is a zone that's been totally abandoned because of the erosion. Well, of course, the Andes are famous for terracing. There's even a hypothesis that when the first conquistadors arrived, the word in Spanish for terrace is andenes, and they might have seen these incredible hillsides, I don't mean right from Lima as a port, but if you go in a little ways and you start to see just whole hillsides in andenes. And maybe that's the origin of the word Andes. But these are just pictures. And of course, it's very picturesque, very interesting. But let me tell you, in the year 2000, since 1950, it's been very hard to get people organized to do that. You know, when you're the Sun King, and you tell folks to do stuff, and they do it because they have no other options, you can have the kind of social organization it takes to build and maintain these kinds of terraces. 

When you're in sort of the option of going to a city, and a lot more happening, and actually the land reform, people each own their own little piece, this is not really a viable option, unless you're going to grow cut flowers, or something, something that's just so interesting, the profit margin. So what we were working on is what's called sloping terraces. This is where you sort of let the same forces that cause erosion help you build terraces. So you try to build a system where you stop the downward slide of water and soil with some kind of barrier. You let the water go through the barrier, or run along the barrier, and you sort of build up soil, so you end up with something that kind of looks like this. It's a sloping terrace. Part of the land is fairly flat, part of it is still fairly sloping. But at least you're not doing, as the previous picture, where they suggested huge excavation. So, this is an example of a precursor to sloping terraces, by planting hedges. You can see the interest of the hedges, because they will let water through them, slow the water down, trap the soil. 

Another technique is with these infiltration ditches. So you have a ditch there. The key is to throw the soil on the upside of the ditch, like it's drawn in this picture. The wrong way to do it is the one below, where you throw it on the easier way, which is downhill. But what happens, is by building these barriers to water flow, soil begins to get trapped behind them. And you start to have, that's not your whole field, you have an area in the field that has an improved soil depth, has an improved, usually because the water stops there, you'll have slightly more water. Here's a case of where we started to work with sloping terraces, and trying to rehabilitate a hillside farm. I think you can see that this is really, this top area, these are the ditches that we built. These are a new set we built. These are the ones that were built maybe, this is a picture taken about five or six years after these infiltration ditches were built in the top half. 

And already, we were starting to be able to get some small grain production. These are the new sets of ditches that we're building to try to recuperate the rest of the slope on this farm. What we did, again, to sort of talk a little bit about how we could persuade investors, and when I say investors here, I mean maybe the local bank. How do we persuade maybe the local government agency to give low interest loans. And so, what we did is there's a lot of models that do a pretty good job, actually, of estimating potato yield. And so, what we did, if you can imagine. I mean, it's hard to imagine what a 30% slope is. To give you an idea, in Wisconsin, there are really very few fields that you ever see. The steepest field you see, I would imagine isn't much above 8%. So, I'm talking about going from 30% to 20%, so we're very, very steep. 

And so, what we did, by modeling what would happen to infiltration rates, when you went from 30% to 20%, we could show that potato yield should almost double. In this case, it actually went from 12 to 27. These lines on the outside are confidence intervals. But my point is that we were able to argue with the rural development bank that helping farmers do sloped terraces would, any money they'd loan, the low-interest loans they gave to the farmers, would be paid back with these increased yields, and primarily do to improved water storage. Obviously, if you're going to get a yield that's twice as high, pretty quickly, you're going to have to put more manure or more fertilizer on. And this isn't for free, but it just gives you the potential. This is a fairly low, I think for the rainfall, I put there 550mm. That's 20 inches of rain. Anyway, it's the kind of thing we used and went to the bank with, with the farmers. And with the research I showed you just before of what happens, how quickly you can start to make money and rehabilitate, recover, to get low-interest loans for farmers to do sloping terraces. 

My next example is one in Ecuador, and it's around the issue of pesticides. And potatoes are really a crop that's very difficult to grow without the use of pesticides. I think there's something like 300 or 400 acres of organic potatoes in the United States. It's hard to do. The way we do it in Wisconsin is to get a farmer who's willing to rent, kind of itinerant. What you do is you go into a field that's been in alfalfa for four or five years, and the farmer says, all right, you can get a crop of potatoes. You see what I mean? He'd have to be an organic grower who has alfalfa. And before he goes into corn or some other crop, he let's you grow potatoes for one year. Then you've got to go look for someone else to work with. 

So, potatoes are difficult. So there's lots and lots of pesticides used. I think you can imagine, like everywhere in the world, it's the poorest people that spray for the people who are a little bit richer, right? So, you've got your potato farm on the edge of town, and you know that at 6:00 in the morning, on a certain corner in town, you can pick up guys who need day work. You throw them in the back of the pickup truck, you drive a couple miles out to your place. And so there are some people, unfortunately, in the community, they spray a lot of acres. You might, yourself, only have two acres of potatoes, and a lot of people do it themselves. But there is a whole issue here. These pictures show these men actually not in what you'd have to wear in the United States. But they're not bad. 

They're wearing long pants. They guy's got boots on. But you can imagine that with these pesticides in the United States, you should have rubber gloves. You should have a mask. And in reality, by mid-afternoon, it's pretty hot, so you're in your shorts. You're in your flip flops. And you've got this backpack sprayer that's maybe leaking on your back. And you know, you've got a drum over here, where you poured the chemical, you've poured the water, you've mixed it, and you're taking a scoop of some sort, and filling the backpack sprayer to do the rest of the field. So, it's a pretty scary situation that happens. Well, just to give you an idea. 

And then, of course, here's the Indian farmer and here's the dealer, telling him what to do. And it's amazing, when we really looked at it, these guys were spraying maybe ten times a season, and you know, the idea that if a little bit is good, a lot is better. And so, we end up having these incredible cocktails. And when we interviewed people and asked them if they understand what a red, what a yellow, what a green label meant, which is what we have to do on pesticides, people didn't know what that meant. And so, it is a dangerous situation. Well, what we did, the way it is in Ecuador, like in many countries, is if you become a doctor, you're usually at the state university and your tuition is almost free. So the deal is for that, you have to work a couple of years in a rural community for the Ministry of Health. So we had a couple young guys that were very interested in our project. We said, listen, can you dig a little deeper when you have somebody come to the clinic to see if you can understand why are they throwing up? Why do they have a headache? 

Why is their vision blurred? Instead of just solving the symptoms, dig a little bit, so we can get some idea of who important the use of pesticides are. And it was frightening what we found. And then, when we studied the literature, we found incredibly high rates of people who were coming into the clinic, like I say, with a headache. And this situation, you get a headache, you throw up, you have blurred vision, and then finally, from pesticides, which is what we use in potatoes, you know, herbicides, with a couple of exceptions, are least likely to kill you. Fungicides also. But insects, because they're fairly complex animals, organisms, I should say, insecticides are quite toxic to people. And what they do, in the worst of cases, they kill you. The next to worst case is they affect your cognitive senses. I mean, you can go to places where people have been using a lot of insecticides, and using them badly, and give them tests for counting backwards, or doing all kinds of things, and they have less intellectual capacity because of the work they've been doing. 

It's really quite frightening. Anyway, lots and lots of intoxications. And then, when we studied how long somebody was out, when you added the number of days that they had to stay home because they were dizzy, or just felt too sick, and the medicines they had, they lost seven days of wages a year. You know where I'm going with this. To try to put it into dollars and cents, so we could go down to Quito and tell the legislature, listen, we need better labeling. We need better rules about pesticides in this country, because look at what's happening to people. One of the most interesting things we did, and this one was really quite cool, is we put some fluorescent dye in backpack sprayers. And then, we'd study at night with a black light, where the dye showed up. So I think you could sort of imagine that if you're out there in the field spraying, and then your little daughter brings you your lunch pail, and she's going to sit and have lunch with you, and so you peel her banana for her, but of course, your hands are covered with what just seemed wet, but of course it's the pesticide, the insecticide and our fluorescent dye, which you can't see until you put under a black light. Anyway, it was really quite frightening. 

And it was quite educational. Because what you do in the High Andes, also, is people don't have, obviously, a lot of money. But at the end of the day, very often, to make the bed warmer, you actually put your day clothes, you know, on top of the bedspread, to make the bed warmer. And then, obviously, you change the baby on the bed. But that's been already touched by the shirt you were wearing earlier in the day. So we found traces of this dye in the kitchen, on all the kids, in the bedroom, on the spigot. It was really quite interesting. And people could see it, because you put the black light on. And they realized that what they thought they had left in the field, they were actually bringing home with them. And we made this into a whole program. 

And you would have somebody talk about the symptoms at market day. And it was a good program. We actually did get, the governor of that region was actually so upset by this information, he helped us lead the charge to try to get some rules changed in Quito. The chemical companies won. Nothing got changed. But it's, you know, it happens here. But it was really quite frightening. And in fact, it's quite amazing, some of the big groups that do look at pesticides in tropical agriculture, the bottom line is, if you have something that's highly toxic, you absolutely can't market it in good conscience. Because in these countries, where people are poor and they're not going to say I'm not going to do it unless you give me boots and gloves and a mask, you know, there's no sets of rules you can make that will mean that these people don't poison themselves. Not themselves, but poison some people just because these things are so toxic, and there's no way of managing it, no matter what rules and penalties you make. 

You're so far from the center of town, you know what I mean, so that some of these highly toxic pesticides just have to come off the market. The last example, because then I hope we can have a couple of questions, or a little discussion, maybe you have some experiences, is using a watershed approach to participatory land use planning and estimating environmental services. So most of what I've been talking about is these upper watersheds, areas that are pretty far from, if there is a hydro-electric plant, where the hydro-electric plant is, pretty far from town. And one of the exercises we did, is we asked villagers, this is kind of a consensus drawing of what this village looked like and how they used the land in different parts of their village. So, this is La Torre community in La Encanada watershed. This was their drawing. And we said, is there a way we can use this to go beyond this sketch map. So, we brought some aerial photos that had been ortho-rectified. But once we got that sketch drawing on this map, it was then we could put it in the computer. And so, you can see, we had a lot of discussion. 

Where's the area people are farming? Where's the area that people should stop farming, because it's being heavily eroded? Where do they graze? Where do they get their firewood? We had all these discussions and questions about how they used their resources in their community. Well, without going through this drawing, I think you can imagine that if you know something about the slope of the land, if you know something about the soil types and soil depth, and you know something about land use cover. Is it in forest? Is it in crops? Is it in pasture? You can begin to make maps of what you might say would be better land use plans. 

And so, then what we did is we made a map, that same one you saw earlier, that was a sketch, this was now based on the aerial photo and lots of discussion. So we have these different categories. Some of the areas are no intervention, meaning their land use is good. But if I take-- I'm so close to this, I have a hard time seeing the colors. But this is an area in purple, the deeper purple, where it seemed to us that farmers should be not going in and cutting the trees down. These were remaining remnants of forests that played an important role in the hydrology of that zone. Without going into the details, this then became another point of discussion with the villagers. They had their drawing. They watched us make this different drawing. And then this was based on that little set of rules I showed you earlier. 

This isn't the final one, but I think you can sort of see it begins to give people the wherewithal to talk about how they might change land use. A last example, is this is a different area. And in this case, I'll tell the story quickly. This is the hydrology of this little watershed. The way it's divided up, because of the model we were using, is this is watershed 13. And at this point, if I know the slope and I know the type of vegetation, and I have a general idea of the rainfall, I can estimate what's moving down to this point here, where it's joined by watershed 12. The water flow and the soil here moves into watershed 9. So I think you can sort of imagine how, with some basic elements about the topography, the land use and the rainfall, you can begin to estimate water flow and sediment flow out when it leaves this municipality. Okay, so when we did our first pass, it's a model called SWAT, which is in Spanish. And we did it with our Peruvian colleagues. 

We came up with this map and maybe the thing, the dark red and the blue are really areas of tremendous soil loss, just keep that in mind, tremendous soil loss. Then we said to the, you know, again, this is lots of debate and discussion. We said, what would happen if we took all the areas that were in slopes 20% or above, and could reforest them? Okay, so this is, again, a little bit of a game, because this is a model. And I don't have the money in hand to do it. But we're saying, what could we do? And what happens is, you can see the blue and the red become much smaller, so there'd be a lot less soil and water, you know, peak flow of water, which is what really carries the soil, leaving out here at this point, where it leaves the watershed. So then we said, okay, can we make that more concrete? And what you have here is from the model. We did, for the rainfall for about 1500 days, about a five-year period, we modeled what would happen to stream flow at the exit. 

And these sharp points are the areas where the flow with the trees on all the slopes above 20% would be much lower than they would be, had they not had the trees there. And the point is, about 15 times over those years, we markedly affected the peak flow, which is of course, the dangerous flow for erosion, for houses, for taking out stream banks. When we did the same thing for the actual soil movement, again these are the areas where, it's a bit of a strange graph, but it's showing the difference between when we had the trees, when you don't have trees and when you do have trees. And again, we ended up with a number of times when we markedly reduced the sediment load going down the river. Well, again, it's not by accident we worked in this watershed because down below. How many people can say Jecquetepeque three times quickly? And Gallito Ciego, if you don't know Spanish, that's kind of a nice name. It's Blind Chicken Dam. So we'll keep it as Gallito Ciego. Anyway, Jecquetepeque is downstream. 

This is a dam built by the best technology, it happened to be Germans. So based on all their experience in the Alps, this is the best dam they could imagine for the Andes. And of course, the Andes are a much newer mountain chain. And what was supposed to be a dam that wouldn't start to need any excavation for about 90 years, after about five years, well it was seven years, I guess, they started to fill up. When you build a dam, they take a lot of dirt and that's the dead space that could get re-filled up with erosion. Well, of course, they don't have el niño in the Alps. And so, we had a couple of el niño years. And pretty quickly, this huge installation was very concerned about erosion, soil, moving down the watershed. So we went to them and said, look, we've done this modeling. This is some of the difference of what would happen if we could get trees on these slopes. 

So, we were able to, actually, we ended up working with a pharmaceutical company from Switzerland. And there is a tree that has a nut that has an essential oil that's used in cosmetics. And we were able to plant this tree on many, many of the slopes in that town. And of course, the interest in planting trees is you know, you're replacing farmland, folks need to eat. So part of our problem was until the tree, which takes about five years to start producing fruit, how are we going to help the farmers who had most of their land in this area that we were suggesting be treated differently. And I won't go into that now, but I just meant that it's this kind of thinking that landscapes, thinking of communities, and how to resolve problems, that I think is the hallmark of the kind of work that we did. And I guess those were the couple of examples that I wanted. I have one more, but maybe I'll just stop there, Kevin, because this is a case where we worked with the village in carbon sequestration. And I think that'll take me too long. I guess I did want to leave here. 

And here, because a little bit like Michael Pollan, science is good. People are better. But I did want to say, that one of the special things about working in the Andes, and I think it's true for working with any group of people whether they're Wisconsin farmers or others, is that you know, the huge payback for an individual is the friends you make, and just becoming part of a culture. These are women dancing. These are famous bowler hats of women in Bolivia. Anyway, I guess I hope I've presented you some examples of this kind of bringing science into a different environment. And I might say, it's kind of a difficult science, because it's the science of natural resources and livelihoods. And there's a tendency, as you know, to simplify and be sort of an ecologist, and farmers are the darn problem. Or, be a farmer and it's those dang ecologists, they're you know, screwing up the system. And the trick is, again, it's not that everything is win-win. 

That's unrealistic. But sometimes you find win-wins. And you always do better, obviously if you can bring information from both sides, so that if this land goes out of agriculture into trees, what was the value of production. What is that family losing by putting trees in for five years? And that gives you kind of the meat and potatoes, where you can go to a donor of some sort, a bank, and you can say, listen, this is what we need. I think that's the goal of scientists. Thank you. 
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