OUAHIGOUYA, Burkina Faso (Reuters) – Yacouba Sawadogo mumbles advice to his sons as they push a sapling into the red soil using an ancient technique he adapted to conjure a forest out of Burkina’s rain-starved soil Faso.
The farmer who is well in his seventies is hailed throughout his province as “the man who stopped the desert.” He won that title after adapting a method of growing plants in wells to retain water – essential in the hardcrabble area at the edge of the Sahara.
After a terrible drought ravaged the Sahel in the 1970s and 1980s, many Sawadogo neighbors left their farms in northern Burkina Faso. But he stayed.
The pressure on the land remains. Wind erosion, water shortages, rapid population growth and overgrazing are causing approximately 470,000 hectares of land to deteriorate per year, according to data from the Ministry of the Environment.
His use of so-called zai wells has created a 40-acre oasis of thorny acacia, yellow-fruited saba and other trees in four decades near his village in Yatenga province, bordering Mali.
“This forest you see today was really a desert – there wasn’t even the shade of a single tree here,” he says, as the sunlight casts his face through the canopy above.
Farmers have dug small wells in the sun-baked soil for centuries and filled them with organic matter for their plants. Sawadogo experimented with digging wider and deeper wells and using stones.
When it rains, his well pit collects more water that is fed to the seeds, increasing crop yields by up to 500%, according to the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).
According to a 2018 study in the journal Sustainability, the use of zai and similar soil and water conservation methods across the West African country has improved food security, groundwater levels, tree cover and biodiversity over the past 30 years.
Sawadogo continues to plant. “If there are no trees and the land is not maintained, it would be a disaster.”
Reporting by Thiam Ndiaga and Yvonne Bell; Written by Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Edward McAllister and Andrew Heavens