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By Dr. Ridgely Abdul Mu’min Muhammad

During the Saviours’ Day weekend of 2010 Mother Tynetta Muhammad invited me
to come on the Mxodus tour to some small villages on the west coast of Mexico.
It seems that there is a small enclave of Mexicans of African descent who could
be helped by some of my agricultural expertise. I said that I would love to
come, however I must first get a clear picture of what the farmers there were
already doing and what were the environmental and agronomic constraints for that
area. Farming techniques and equipment that may work well in one environment may
not work in another environment. I had to take a lesson from my own book “The
Science and Business of Farming vs. The Art and Hobby of Gardening”. In this
book I emphasize how you must look at the farm as a “system” and must fully
grasp the environment that the farm system must operate under. Successful
farming is a matter of balancing forces of nature and human society to obtain a
sustainable system. Just because a plant will grow or an animal can live does
not mean that an economically viable system can be produced in which the
majority of the population is satisfied and the land, water and air is not
destroyed.

We arrived in the Huehuetan in the Costa Chica area of Mexico on Friday,
April 16th, and I immediately noticed how dry and hilly the land was. The
vegetation was dry and a dull green. The animals were thin and emaciated. This
was in April where things were getting very green back home in Georgia, but here
I wondered about the rain.

The next day I asked local farmers through an interpreter what were their
major problems. Immediately they said they needed water and their soils lacked
fertility. I noticed that there were a number of capped off wells at homes in
the little village. The farmers said that the wells dried up about 15 years ago.
The water table has dropped but there is water from 5 to 30 meters underground.
It would cost about $6,000 to dig a well, but they had little financial
resources.

I also asked them about the rain. They said that they were in the dry season
which goes from October to May. However, even during the rainy season 60 to 75%
of the total rainfall comes in just two months, July and August. When these
rains come they fall in torrents which washes away the remaining topsoil on the
hilly slopes.

We compared notes on how to grow different crops like corn, beans and
watermelons at our farm in Georgia compared to their farms in and around
Huehuetan. Indeed where we might use a bottom plow to turn under weeds in
preparation for planting, harrow and smooth the soil, then plant with our
tractor driven planters, they just waited for the first rains and pushed the
seeds in the wet ground with their finger. At first one my say, well you see
they need to come up to the modern times and learn how to grow scientifically.
Fortunately, there was a scientist who gave a presentation at this annual “Black
People’s Conference” in which we participated. Mr. Fermin Marinez Hernandez
from the Universidad Automa Chapingo specializing in appropriate technology
emphasized that because of the hot climate and thin soils American styled
farming depending on heavy tractors and the turning up of the soil would destroy
the fragile soils in this area. A farmer would want to disturb the thin topsoil
as little as possible, because when he exposes lower levels of the soil to the
sun, the excessive heat will burn up the organic matter and nutrients in the
soil. Therefore the local farmers’ method of sticking a seed in the ground
after a rain, waiting for the plant to emerge, then pushing more dirt to the
plant as it grows is the “scientific method” to use under their climatic and
agronomic conditions.

I thank Allah for sending Mr. Hernandez to us so that I could learn from a
scientific point of view what was happening and what might be needed in this
poor area. Again Mr. Hernandez emphasized the need for the farmers to augment
their water supply by either digging wells, building cisterns or restructuring
the roof system on their houses to catch water and divert it to home cisterns. A
cistern is a receptacle to catch and store rainwater. They can be built above
ground or below grown. It can be as small as a 10,000 liter (2,642 gal.) plastic
container for home use. The islands of Bermuda and the US Virgin Islands can be
looked at as examples of the extensive use of using roofs as rainwater
harvesting devices and cisterns for storage.

For irrigation purposes farmers can get together and build much larger
rainwater storage systems that would capture the excessive rains in July and
August to have it available for plants and animals throughout the dry season.
However, there is another important element that Mr. Hernandez pointed out that
must be factored into any problem solving equation and that is the human
element. People must first see the need, find possible solutions and then be
ready to change and make the necessary investments to install the systems
needed.

As I stated earlier, the wells in the Huehuetan area dried up about 15 years
ago. The contrasts between the rainy and dry seasons have gotten wider. The
people in the area may have hoped and prayed for the climate to go back to a
more favorable balance, however sooner or later they must decide to either wait
or make a move. Added to their extreme poverty is the unstable political
environment where they do not trust the banking system or the government. If
they were to organize a cooperative, where would they store the money; who could
they trust; how could they protect themselves? These are all very real
non-agronomic issues that must be dealt with before a viable solution can be
actualized.

I mentioned to the participants at the conference how in their past history
of Mexico they had examples of how the people got together on a collective basis
to solve major problems of survival. We were blessed to have at the conference
Mr. Alberto Ruz who was the son of a famous archaeologist in Mexico who
unearthed many pyramids and ancient pyramid complexes in the Yucatan. I asked
him if there was a relationship between water and the pyramids, because I have
written in my books starting in 1988 that the pyramids in Ancient Egypt were
part of a water irrigation and purification system. He said that next to each
pyramid was a “cenote”. A cenote is sinkhole with exposed rocky edges
containing grownwater. Mr. Ruz said that some of the underground streams
attached to these cenotes can be followed beneath the rock until they reached
the Gulf of Mexico. The water is fresh at the top but becomes saltier as you go
deeper and get closer to the sea.

So now the mystery of why the Mayan civilization once flourished then
declined can be explained by observing what has happened at Huehuetan. The Mayan
people centered their agricultural and religious centers around “fresh water”,
cenotes. Evidently, over time the water was over utilized which either caused it
to disappear altogether, as in Huehuetan or become rendered useless due to salt
water intrusion.

One of the purposes of the “Black Peoples Conference” was to instill a
sense of identity and pride among the people of African descent in this area of
Mexico so that they can reach within themselves, organize themselves and solve
problems for themselves. The farmers in the area seem to have a sense of what
they need to do and have started to form some type of organization to solve
their problems. Again I thank Mother Tynetta Muhammad for inviting me on this
journey. I have learned more from the people there than I have taught them. We
hope to continue to work with them, inspire them and then use them as an example
of what is missing in the Black communities of America, the “will” to
survive.