Indeed, as some of my interlocutors in the African institutes remarked, there can be marked imbalances in terms of access granted by local chiefs to peasants depending on their kin and patronage networks, and differences in ethnicity, age, gender, or migration status. Especially for immigrant peasants and those in areas of high pressure on arable land, the assignment of land plots to households by village authorities is far from secured. “It can be taken from the peasant at any time, if for some reason the elders decide that the true owner of that piece of land is somebody else”, one of the Burkinabe researchers explained to me. These issues stretched far beyond the technical scope of the C-4 Project. Nonetheless, as Brazilian front liners quickly learned, they impinged directly on the possibilities of transferring Embrapa technologies to peasant land. Most germane to the project was the fact that this situation tended to discourage long term planning and farmers’ investment in the land plots they worked. And no-till was considered a technique that necessarily requires long term thinking, since many of the benefits driving its original development are not immediately evident in the short term. In terms of the project’s main problem – productivity –, the benefits of soil conservation are manifested less as immediately rising yields than as preventing their decrease in the long run. And while the agronomist or planner sees both, the peasant – my interlocutors insisted – sees only the former. As will be resumed in the next chapter, the question of evidence – how to convince farmers that the problem exists, and how to demonstrate that the proposed solution is working or will work – became one of the keys to the project’s technology adaptation and transfer strategy. Finally, no-till’s third and last pillar – crop rotation – involved yet another set of context making and scaling operations. Crop rotation is a major piece of context in Brazil’s experience with no-till cotton: if in much of West Africa cotton has been “king” since colonial times, in Brazil’s late-century agricultural boom cotton has thrived on the heels of queen soybean.

In the aftermath of the boll weevil crisis,hydroponic nft system cotton re-emerged during the “soybean cycle” 200 as a succession culture to that which is today the paramount crop in cerrado agriculture, largely aimed at export to Asian markets. In a common configuration, cotton is planted in the window that was opened in the cerrado agricultural calendar by the introduction of more precocious varieties of soybean, with life cycles as short as 100 days. This means that, between the harvest of soybean and the end of the rainy season, there is enough time to plant a second crop , and sometimes even a third one of pasture for feeding cattle. Even though some Embrapa researchers showed nuanced views about this highly intensive and technified production system,it was this configuration – rather than that of smallholder cotton production in the Northeast – that they presented most often to African partners. This seeming in congruence only appears as paradoxical, however, if one takes the scale of property size and capital-intensity. In fact, by and large, Brazilian and African peasants do not grow cotton for the same market: the latter produce for the same world market in which Brazilian large-scale farmers sell their cotton, while Brazilian smallholders produce mostly for domestic or niche markets such as organic or colored cotton. African peasant farmers are faced with higher demands in terms of productivity, timing, or quality standards. Technically speaking, in no-till crop rotation follows a logic similar to that of conventional agriculture: to recycle and better utilize soil nutrients, interrupt the cycle of pests, diseases and adventitious weeds, and improve soil structure by alternating root types. Project front liners did not foresee many difficulties here, as West African peasants already grew cotton amidst a diversified pool of crops, and did some rotation between them. This was however done differently than in the Brazilian cerrado. In West Africa, at current levels of technification of production, rain patterns typically allow for only one crop per year. In-between, there is a long dry season of around seven months – also known locally as “hunger season” – which is, according to many of my local interlocutors, getting increasingly lengthier “due to climate change”.

Other plants are therefore intercropped with cotton simultaneously, competing against it for land, labor and inputs.This complementary-competitive relationship between cotton and food crops has been one of the defining features of the system in West Africa, and, as will be seen in the next chapter, of peasant decision-making locally. The idea was that the improvement of cotton production within a mixed system would bring in its stead more and better food crops, and vice-versa. “I say that cotton can be the main food crop in these countries”, the project coordinator was fond of saying. This ambivalent coexistence between cotton and food crops is also a legacy of French colonialism. In its modern version,cotton was already born as an industrial and global crop. Since it did not grow well in Europe’s temperate climate, cotton was encouraged in Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere by all colonial powers as an export item to metropolitan markets.More than any other crop, it shares the iconicity and global character of the economic sector that raised it to world prominence: the textile industry. A central stage of the origin story of Western modernity so powerfully recounted by Marx in Das Kapital, the textile industry and its associated cotton supply chain played an important part in the process that led to the abolition of the slave trade during the Pax Britannica, and from there to the scramble for Africa later on in the nineteenth century. The “cotton famine” during 1861-65 – a period of acute supply shortages caused by the civil war in the U.S., by then the largest world cotton producer – was a key factor in pushing Britain and other industrializing European nations to tighten their imperial grasp over tropical possessions in Asia and Africa . As Mamdani eloquently framed this link between nineteenth-century colonialism and Western Europe’s Industrial Revolution, “in [the] constellation of raw materials that would feed European manufacturing, the pride of place belonged to cotton. The three c’s that Livingstone claimed would together rejuvenate Africa were cotton, Christianity, and civilization”.In much of colonial Africa, cotton was, as Mamdani put it, the “archetypical forced crop” . As such, it participated in colonialism’s regime of compulsions that gave rise to the overall food versus cash crop dichotomization remarked in the previous chapter. In the case of West Africa, historians prefer to talk about a mixed system featuring both coercion and market incentives, which confronted peasants with “a set of constraints and opportunities over which they often had little control” .

Even today, no peasant farmer is, strictly speaking, forced to plant cotton; but they often have little option outside of it. This may be also reflected at the level of nation-states; as I once heard a group of Beninese agronomists teasing their Chadian colleagues as they arrived early in the morning for one of the project meetings, “What are you guys doing here anyway? Why do you even bother with cotton? You have oil!” As far as the technical make-up of no-till is concerned, however, production scale, market destination, or property size are not constraining factors per se. No-till is a highly flexible crop and soil management system,nft channel and there are endless possibilities of permutation within and between the three pillars; what adaptive research does is precisely to try to find the best fit according to each “context”. In Brazil, the system is applied to a broad variety of crops, from soybean to trees, from beans to pasture; it is found from cold regions in the Brazilian South to hot and humid Amazonic conditions; from large-scale, mechanized, input-intensive industrial agriculture to small agro-ecologic family farms. Moreover, its adaptive potential goes beyond the domain of “nature” proper, including “social” factors in terms for instance of what crops will be chosen , what outcome will be emphasized , or what kind of productive structure is available locally . Thus, adaptation to each production region, and ideally to each production unit, is an inherent feature of the technique itself: research is a continuous effort, even after technology transfer to farmers has been accomplished. It became essential, therefore, to enroll the African researchers into the project’s effort not just formally. In the world of development, participation in projects in itself is not so much the problem; as especially actor-centered approaches have shown, local actors have their own interests in engaging with foreign partners, and will do it even if for only as long as projects last . In the C-4 Project, the effort was, rather, to nourish a commitment with a longer term research enterprise – in other words, to achieve robustness beyond its organizational scope as described in the first section. In this sense, the C-4 researchers were encouraged to gradually take the reins of technical decision-making in the adaptive research process. Brazilian front liners recognized this as a slow and to some extent open-ended process: “What we’re doing here is sowing a seed. The benefits will be not for these children you see, but for their children and grandchildren”, the project coordinator would tell me every once in a while. Note that he did not say “the benefits, if there are any” – despite all the difficulties envisaged in adaptation and especially transfer to farmers, there was a confidence, which the African agronomists tended to share, that the technology was good, and that one day it could bring concrete benefits to West African peasant farmers. At this stage, however, no one could predict the exact form – or most likely, forms – that no-till and its accompanying systemic components would take in their new environment. As one of the Embrapa researchers put it, referring to the difficulties involving soil cover, “who knows, maybe in West Africa no-till will end up with only two pillars”.

As De Laet and Mol’s bush pump, no-till was regarded as fluid enough to remain functional even if one of its three legs went missing as it made its way across the Southern Atlantic. But while the project did take into account the potential constraints involved in transferring the Brazilian version of no-till to West African peasant farmers – especially the problem of cattle, land tenure and agricultural inputs –, not all were incorporated into the experimental work . Many, or perhaps most, of these ended up being bracketed out so that the Embrapa cooperantes would first focus on making sure that their partners in the local institutes acquire robust scientific mastery over the technique itself. The African front liners dealing most immediately with no-till, usually agronomists by training, had at least basic knowledge about its underlying logic, and local versions of no-till could be found in some patches of rural areas for instance in Burkina Faso.But these were quite limited in number and scope, and few of the local agronomists had received systematic training or done specialized research on the system previously to the project. An important exception was the project’s head agronomist in Mali, who worked for a few years on no-till as part of a project with the French CIRAD210 and wrote his PhD dissertation based on that experience. But even the agronomists from the other institutes seemed to have developed a particular interest in the technique, and along with it, in the project itself. In fact, my impression was that within this project, agronomists were more valued and enjoyed a leading role that they may not normally have in their institutes, at least when compared to breeders, weed scientists, entomologists and other researchers whose work tend to relate more closely to the development of commercial products such as improved seeds and agrochemicals. On the other hand , the kind of research work agronomists did often brought them closer to farmers and the latter’s own ways of taking care of the crops and the land. In the project’s two other technical components, the adaptation process unfolded at a slower pace.