I've been following the discussion on bamboo with interest. It's not uncommon for people to develop "pet" plants in development circles. I'm certainly not suggesting that the bamboo thread is spurious--and not so subtly suggesting this thread may be. An example of what I mean by a "pet" plant is hemp. Oh hemp has such complicated human stories that go along with it. There's a surprisingly good movie from 1999 Grass that tells a bit of the story of the criminalization of marijuana in the USA. One interesting fact is that industrial hemp is not an oxymoron. The current focus is on fiber, but historically the seed oil was probably more important commercially.

As useful as I think hemp as a crop is, I'm not really an advocate for it, because it seems such and uphill battle against entrenched interest.

However a fiber crop that has been getting a great deal of attention in research is Kenaf. That plant has piqued my imagination. There are a couple of persistent ideas that keep circling around in my head. The first is rather speculative and the second has a bit more practical application, even if it's not specifically about Kenaf.

So the more speculative first. One of the great imaginative architects today is Shigeru Ban. He is well known for his use of paper tubes in constructing buildings. Among the paper tube buildings he's best known for are temporary houses built for the victims of the Kobe earthquake in Japan. His paper tube construction was also used in the refugee camps after the Rwanda genocide.

Shigeru Ban is also notable for recognizing the need to engage architects in the great problems of humanity. He saw doctors and engineers giving their time and wondered why architects didn't. So he was influential in starting Architects for Humanity.

Shigeru Ban makes wonderful buildings which engage my imagination not only as buildings but in his innovative use of materials.

Kenaf interested me at first because it's and African native in the family Malvaceae--hollyhocks--a family of plants represented in my garden by many pretty and useful plants. An annual it can grow to heights of as much as 20 feet in a season. The leaves make excellent forage with a high protein content. And the stems are fibrous. The outer fibers are longer and strong, good for cordage for example, those fibers constitute about 30%-35% of the dried stem by weight and are called bast fibers. The remaining fibers from the core are shorter--fluff. Both have uses.

Getting a load of cardboard tubes for Opok Farm Village doesn't seem very practical. Paper mills are very capital intensive plants. However paper has been made since antiquity. So small scale paper making isn't completely out of the question. Indeed art papers are a documented cottage industry for export commodity trades from small scale enterprises in Africa.

Somewhere along the line reading about potential building materials made from Kenaf I saw that a simple paper can be made by floating the bast fibers--the bast fibers and core fibers are separated in a conventional hammer mill operation--on a screen. Quite a while ago I bought some cards from LiA. The cards were wrapped in banana fiber, so the result would be something like that.

I do suspect that rolling Kenaf paper tubes with similar rigidity as the commercial tubes Shigeru Ban uses would be quite difficult on a cottage industry scale. However rolling tubes doesn't seem that hard to imagine--at least I can come up with rough versions in my head as to how I might make such machines.

In soft soils and when holes are dug with back hoes, often paper tubes are used as easy concrete forms, say for footers for pole buildings. So it occurs to me that even relatively floppy paper tubes could be stiffened with mortar for example and then filled.

Another material that Shigeru Ban has experimented with is papercrete. Obviously I haven't tested any of my wild ideas, but the potential for using Kenaf makes me dream of all sorts of applications for it.

There actually is quite a lot of organized dreaming about what to do with Kenaf on an industrial scale here in the USA. There are even paper mills operating using the domestically produced crop. But one of the things holding back the pace of development is seed. To set viable seed requires more frost free days than many of the areas where Kenaf is being grown. So I wondered about growing Kenaf seed for export in Uganda.

Actually I think a lot about seeds anyway. One of the big challenges is to come up with ideas that scale well. One of the ideas that I've told everyone I know with a computer in Africa is that a seed exchange seems like an idea that would scale well. Nobody has ever taken the least bit of interest, still I think it's a good and practical idea. At least it's an idea that a database would be useful for.

When the discussion has turned to essential oils and herbs, something that has occurred to me is that it would be useful to experiment growing theses in small plots, just to see how they fare and how to grow them. Many of these plants can be grown from seed but are more practically propagated vegetatively. But the point is that for a small investment a small but very varied garden of commercially important herbs could be started from a small investment in seed. The main thing would be the investment in time and attention to the project. Not all of the plants would grow well or find people wanting to grow them, but I believe the chances are good that some one or another of the plants would find a market as nursery plants.

That's a bit off the subject of seed exchanges. Really commercially seed production is a tough business, although one that African growers do succeed in--for example most of the new marigold cultivars come from African growers. But the practice of seed saving is something that is ideally dispersed. Small quantities by weight have value.

The connection between LiA in Gulu and Kampala is a great one. Urban gardens are something that are increasingly important for income generation in cities. Mostly those growers need seeds for fast growing greens. The Opok Farm Village could be a supplier of seeds to urban market growers.

With the recent floods, and in particular the damage to ground nut crops, the hungry season will be extended from 2 months to 10 months in many areas. Governments are encouraging people to grow fast growing crops to make the gap. But I wonder about the availability of seeds for such crops.

In any case a systematic seed exchange where growers provide seeds in exchange for other seeds seems like an institution which could benefit a whole region in so many ways.

Individual farmers generally feel little incentive to experiment with new crops. But a seed exchange might provide just enough encouragement for more diversity. It's something that wouldn't take too much money to begin and could scale.

Certainly I would encourage Opok Farm Village to grow some small scale experimental crops. For example experimenting with Kenaf wouldn't take too much to begin with. A single packet of seeds, if the seeds were collected could begin experiments which have some probability of paying off, just as the herb garden plants would. Even if commercial results weren't quickly forthcoming the information gained would be valuable ans significant.

So there's two half baked ideas for today: 1) Kenaf the potentially useful fiber crop; and 2) a Seed exchange data base at Opok Farm Village.