It’s early dry season here in Sumba, remote eastern Indonesia and the dragonflies are out in swarms, lantana and chromolaena are flowering and the world surrounding us is iridescent green in the early morning sun. The kids are chattering and running along ahead as we weave our way down the footpath, past the rice paddy to the bamboo. On the top of the hill a traditional limestone burial stone stands proud against the blue sky, testimony to the long history of people in this landscape. One of the kids darts off to move the buffalo to a new patch of grass. The white clay is wet from the morning dew and slippery, unless you grew up here barefoot, then it is just right. The rice paddies are growing well now, swathes of bright emerald, it is hard not to be optimistic, though the rains were late and no one is sure whether there will be enough moisture to get them through to harvest.
This seems to be a question every year now, either unseasonal rain in the dry seasons allowing locusts to swarm, too dry for a decent harvest or swarms or mice invade, stealing rice in the night. Maize crops died with tiny cobs this year when the rains stopped for a few weeks, producing just enough to feed a few chickens but not the staple food for the family they had been hoping for. Farming in the dry climate and infertile soils of Sumba was never a road to riches but in the face of climate change is getting less predictable.
We round the corner into Bapa Tirta’s orchard and tree planting. Nestled among the kapok and candlenut trees he shows us the bamboo plants, the first batch he planted after we bought bamboo from his farm five years ago already reaching tall to the sun and the new seedlings he has just planted after returning from visiting Environmental Bamboo Foundation’s Sekolah Lapang Bamboo (Bamboo Field School) on the nearby island of Flores. He shows us the different techniques he picked up there for establishing bamboo on the less fertile slopes, a challenge he had been thinking about for a while. Later we will go to see the new nursery they developed for establishing bamboo clumps to plant on the hillslopes. Since returning from Flores across Manjali and Tana Tuku villages they have planted more than 1000 bamboo plants, with only 20-30 per farm so that they can be easily looked after.
Bamboo is gaining traction as a sustainable, carbon positive building material. No doubt you have heard the talking points before, bamboo poles are harvested from a living clump, they grow quickly and as a building material it has a tensile strength higher than steel.
It is easy to understand why the properties of bamboo are desirable to the end-user, but why does Bapa Tirta love it? Why has he spent his time experimenting with different planting techniques and keeping the goats and grass clear of the seedlings and working with his neighbours to harvest bamboo?
Bamboo has been growing on their family’s land for longer than he can remember, mostly Au Jawa, Au Tiring and Au Pada each with distinct uses. In the past, everyone used it untreated for the flooring in their traditional houses, for temporary structures for ceremonies and for fences to keep livestock out of the vegetable garden and rice paddies.
Now he is growing it for cash income, demand from the sustainable tourism industry has recovered slowly after pandemic setbacks, but it is coming. Bapa Tirta loves bamboo because it grows whenever it rains, utilising soil moisture at any time of the year, puts nutrients and carbon back into the soil, improves the water holding capacity of the soil down slope, even when locusts come through they eat all of the green leaves but the bamboo quickly recovers. Bamboo is mostly harvested during the dry season, while his workload across the rest of the farm is lower. This year alone he has already sold 3 truckloads of bamboo, providing about Rp 9 million in income ($850), while this doesn’t sound like a lot, it is the equivalent of three months work as a labourer at minimum wage, on an island where more than 30% of farmers live below the poverty line of $1/person/day, which is currently equivalent to less than 1kg of rice.
This year’s harvest is still from the bamboo his grandfathers planted, but next year the first bamboo he planted will be ready for harvest. He has carefully planted out areas that are not used for food production, so growing bamboo won’t compromise rice or corn production.
We have wandered back to the house, the sun is high in the sky and it is humid, we sit on the bamboo verandah, one of the few left in the village and watch the ten year old deftly climb the tree and pick the coconuts, yelling at his little brother to get out of the way as he drops them to the ground. We gratefully accept them, laughing at our own lack of skill with the machete and allowing Bapa Tirta to slice off the top and make a spoon in the process without spilling a drop.
Mama Tirta (following Sumba tradition people are known by the name of their eldest child) smiles with quiet pride and a tinge of sadness as she tells us of her older daughter now at university, something additional income from bamboo has helped with, but also knowing it is unlikely her daughter will return to Sumba as there are work few opportunities. Rambu Yati and Sri smile as they tell Mama Tirta stories of their childhoods in villages nearby and then university in Java and Bali but they reassure Mama Tirta that they now manage the bamboo company (with support) which employs 24 Sumba locals as well as providing income to growers like Bapa and Mama Tirta, new opportunities are coming and there is potential for kids to find a careers and the farm to have a profitable, resilient bamboo future.
Bapa Tirta, Bapa Enos and members of Tananua Sumba Foundation and Sumba Sustainable Solutions teams were supported by Amos Australia small-grant to visit the Environmental Bamboo Foundation’s Bamboo Field School in Ngada, Flores and develop the seedling nursery.
As a development practitioner and start-up founder the best bit of this story is that while progress is slow it is built on a strong base, no fancy reports with lots of numbers to big donors whose support is fleeting, no unicorns in sight. But seems like buffalo, slow, plodding and strong are more at home in this landscape anyway.
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