Farmers’ Livelihoods Decimated By Somalia’s Recent Droughts

Aug 04, 2023

Approximately half of all households in Somalia are headed by women, and women are disproportionately suffering from the country’s compounding challenges of climate change, conflict and food shortages.

Agriculture and livestock provide a livelihood for vast numbers of Somalis, including many women. Yet for many pastoralists (sheep and cattle farmers) the recent failed rainy seasons have decimated their sole source of income.

Ibada, a 54-year-old mother of 7 children, lives in the Sharaf-weyn village of Awdal region in western Somaliland. Ibada had been responsible for 100 goats, enabling her to earn a secure living, but Somalia’s prolonged drought meant she became unable to feed or provide water for her goats.

Ibada watched helplessly in distress as, 1 by 1, her goats died. Without them, she had no means to provide for her family.

Increasing resilience through climate-smart agriculture

Islamic Relief’s Strengthening Agricultural Resilience (SARIA) project aims to increase resilience among livestock farmers. The project is designed to address the challenges of recurring drought and food insecurity in Somalia by supplying farmers with productive livestock and implementing climate-smart agriculture techniques to better protect them against the impacts of climate change.

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Video: Selling Hay for 40 Years: Fritz Trauttmansdorff, Dunlea Farms

Fritz Trauttmansdorff came to Canada from Austria in 1980, bought a 45-cow dairy farm at Jerseyville, and within two years had more hay than he knew what to do with. He sold the quota in 1986, went debt-free, and built a hay business that has kept some of the same customers for forty years. Today Dunlea Farms runs about 2,500 acres — roughly 600 of it hay, the rest IP soybeans and grain corn — and Fritz makes the case that hay isn't the crop you grow when grain doesn't work. It's the crop that makes the grain work.

"If you grow corn, soybeans and wheat, you're on a three-wheeler. If you put hay in the rotation, you're on a four-wheeler."

WHAT WE COVER • Why the hay market moves independently of the Chicago Board — and what that does for farm-level risk
• The real cost of a mistake: five bushels in grain, versus the whole crop in hay
• Getting a second job out of the same iron — planting tractors that mow all summer, tillage tractors that bale
• How a grain farmer can get hay into the rotation without buying a single piece of hay equipment
• Drilling Timothy in the fall and double-cropping soybeans into it the next June
• What it actually takes to go all-in: roughly 500 acres, good sheds, and a baler you didn't buy used
• Local, regional and international hay markets — and choosing which one you're building for
• Why 40-year customer relationships are the asset, not the equipment