Update 3 from the Castle's Sailor-in-Iraq, Joe Honan.

[Joe]

"Farmer Joe" Honan, US Navy Agriculture Specialist.

You know how I said last update that I worked well with the General’s staff on the sheep feed program? Well because of my sins I have been given a second “hat” as the Multinational Forces West Civil Affairs Office Agriculture representative. That’s right, they asked me stay on the General’s staff to do farming. The good news is that I’ve managed to extend myself past sheep and now have visited poultry and fish farms. Its up to the big leagues once I get to see the dairy cows.

To help, the Marines gave me a Gunnery Sergeant. A good man typical of the breed. We met and he said “Sir I don’t know why I have this job, I wanted to run convoys but they said since I grew up on a farm in Michigan I had to do agriculture. I didn’t learn anything as a kid, I just did heavy labor, and spent most of time trying to get out of that!”

I just smiled and said “Gunny, you and me are going to get along just fine.” We have a great officer/NCO relationship. I think big strategic thoughts and he stands on people’s necks until it happens.

Seriously though I don’t think that I’m missing anything because I don’t have an agricultural degree. The issues hare are pretty straightforward. The know how to farm, and most have some type of AG Degree, but the infrastructure here is about thirty years out of date. Some was destroyed in the fighting, some through neglect by the government which in the heavily centralized Saddam era was the only group to do it. The big issue is that power has been disrupted, so there is no electricity for the irrigation pumps or fuel for the generators in the poultry hatcheries. Farmers have been staying afloat by selling livestock or bits of equipment, making the problems worse.

The good news however is that we are not dealing with the “bottom billion.” The people that the Bill and Linda Gates Foundation help survive on less than an acre of land. The farms I’ve visited are large and run by people that know agriculture. I visited a poultry farm a few days ago, the man had incubators, satellite breeder farms, a feed mill and was starting a slaughter house. We asked what his three big issues were, and he said he wanted visas so some of his men could go visit Tyson, electricity at the agriculture college lab so they could do blood tests on his flock, and someone to pave the road so the trucks could come in and buy feed in the rainy season.

Of course, since I wrote that above paragraph, I’ve learned not everyone is as locked on as the poultry guy. There has been some interest in developing fish farms in the area. So to understand what we had to deal with, we found a fish farm one of the civil affairs teams had helped and went to go see them. We knew it was on the Euphrates and across from the water treatment plant, but couldn’t find it. So we pulled the MRAP over and asked directions. Turned out we were right there, but I missed it, because I was looking for stuff like fish and water as a marker. Instead we get pointed to a dry empty hole, with an irrigation ditch leading to a broken pump. No one is there, but I corral the neighbor and ask about the farm. The basic story is that they filled the pool, caught some fish in the river, but the pumped stopped, and in about two days the water went down, and then for some reason the fish died, so they put more in but they died too. Now I’m no expert as you know, but you don’t have to be CSI to know that when the circulation stops there is no aeration of the water, evaporation lowers the water level which increases the temperature, and the high salt content of the soil leeched into the water. Any one of which can kill fish.

Moral of the story is: help the guys that know what they are doing. A few small projects for the poultry farmer goes farther in stabilizing the economy and creating jobs than does building stuff from scratch because someone asks you to. The only way to do this is to get out and about and see as much as you can. So we now have a list of five farmers who buy fish food from the Al Anbar poultry king. We figure since they buy feed, they have to have fish, and will track those guys down to see ground truth. Well anyway, the book for “Post-Combat Operations” hasn’t really been written yet, and its a lot of fun trying to build this airplane while its flying.

We drove past an Iraqi checkpoint and I saw a little girl hanging out there with her father, watching our three armed and armored HUMVEES going past like she’d seen it a million times. I thought about what a weird world she lived in, and how its one we’re hopefully making better for her children.

Anyway, I have a couple of pictures I’ve included. I blacked out the faces of the locals because I never got their permission.