Tuesday - Eastern Georgia

Tuesday

I gave a talk about No-Till crop production to a group of Machinery Service Center owners who were meeting to discuss marketing management.  Jim the other consultant asked me to make a half hour no-till presentation, however the questions and enthusiastic discussion carried on for more than an hour.  I hope the enthusiasm continued on for Jim’s marketing trainings.

Traveling east soon revealed a much dryer region of mostly brown grass lands with grazing cattle and sheep.  Grazing sparse pastures, the very thin back or brown cattle herds were as large as a hundred head.  The valley floor was flat or gently rolling sometimes with corn ripening in the bottom land.  I’m told this is wheat country with less than 30 inches annual rainfall coming seasonally in fall and winter.  Farther east is semi desert. 

During Soviet time this area was irrigated with water conducted by open channels and some via underground pipes.  Occasionally remnants of the concrete channels appear alongside the road.  I’m told that all the metal standpipes and sprinkler heads were pillaged and sold as scrap metal in Turkey after the Soviet collapse.

The soil is black, mellow and highly fertile only wanting for water.  We walked into ripening corn which appeared to be of 100 bushel yield without fertilizer. 

The farmer and his son operate 30 hectares (75 acres) growing corn, wheat, vegetables and fattening beef.  The farmer explained his biggest problems are the unavailability of long term credit and crop insurance.  He described examples of farmers bankrupted, never able to recover, after crops were destroyed by a hailstorm.  This farmer is completely pleased with the service of the machinery service center and thanked me profusely for the American funding that initiated it.  He previously had an old Russian tractor, but now relies completely on the service center for tillage, planting and harvesting.  He expressed dedication to soil stewardship and wishes for more agricultural information services.

My travels will be with Ia the interpreter and Zorab a Georgian agriculturalist educated in a Soviet agricultural university and in the US.  We travel in a Toyota Land Cruiser with a driver.  His driving is very harsh annoying me to the edge of carsickness.  Quick starts, sudden harsh braking, quick jerks on the steering, and jerky gear shifting exacerbates the rough Georgian roads.  It might be a long three days traveling to western Georgia, but I look forward to experiencing the subtropical regions with 120 inches annual rainfall and hopefully the coast of the Black Sea.