That Good, Red Dirt...

In Bluegrass in Duncan, I wrote of my first visit to Duncan, a little town about thirty miles from Lawton. During the summer we had occasion to visit it a few more times and I became familiar with that stretch of the plains that we passed through on the way.

It is very flat, just as one would expect a plain to be. The natural vegetation is dry, short grass with the occasional group of trees lining the creeks and collecting in hollows. Most of it is ranch land with very few fields plowed for crop production and it reminds me of Africa, even down to the red dirt that shows through the grass in eroded areas.

It could so easily be somewhere in Zimbabwe, even though the trees are not acacias and the dirt is a paler red than I remember, that good red dirt of Africa. And it is good; the soil is so fertile that almost anything will grow in it. Throw a tomato away and a few weeks later the spot where it landed will be covered in tomato plants laden with fruit. Plant a few potatoes in rows and water them and very soon you will have more spuds than you can eat. Beans, squashes, cucumbers, any sort of vegetable takes to the earth of Africa as though it was designed for it. Fruit trees love it too and I have yet to find an avocado pear to rival those we picked from the tree in my father's garden in Harare.

This is the great tragedy of Africa: that it has become the continent of famine when all the time its soil is so fertile that it should be the breadbasket of the world, exporting food rather than begging for it. And the reason is water, of course. With water, anything can be grown in Africa; without it, you have a potential desert. There are times when the rains don't arrive and the result is drought and death for the crops.

In Zimbabwe, the farmers made provision for this. Every farm had its few small dams that stored water in the good years in preparation for the bad. Generally, that was enough to hold off the destruction that a couple of drought years in succession can wreak. The result was that Zimbabwe became a food exporter, selling maize and other foodstuffs to many other African countries, even though the major cash crop was tobacco.

Since then things have changed and Zimbabwe has joined most of the rest of Africa in hovering on the edge of perpetual famine. The farmers have been driven from the land and dispersed throughout the world, most to South Africa and Australia. And the land reverts to bush or subsistence farming.

All this comes back to me as we drive through the plains and I see the boundless expanse of land barely used. West Oklahoma is not rich, being without the oil wells and higher rainfall of the East, yet I cannot help but wonder whether its real wealth is being overlooked. That soil looks to me very much like the good, red dirt of Africa. It is grassland soil, just waiting for water to complete its fertility.

Suddenly two things click together in my mind and I have a dream, a dream of what might have been. All those Zimbabwe farmers, forced to leave the lands they loved, taking with them their knowledge and experience of getting the best from dry grassland soils, and this land in West Oklahoma, begging to achieve its potential...

What a marriage made in heaven that might have been, the African farmer and the good, red dirt of Oklahoma! It is too late now to call them back, but I am certain that those weathered and leathery hands could have turned these empty fields into a cornucopia of produce. Then might Idaho have been forced to look to its laurels as the great potato producer of the States. California, too, would have had to watch over its shoulder as the citrus farmers of OK gained ground on them. I might even have been able to buy a decent avocado in the supermarket, rather than these pathetic, tasteless and tiny imitations that are fobbed off on us at the moment.

I know, I'm a dreamer. But, if no-one dreams, nothing ever changes. Allow me this one vision of how things might have been. Sure, I know that there are plenty of arguments that could be made against such a scheme, but none insurmountable. It could have worked.

Who knows? Those old guys might have produced enough food to feed Africa...