In 2024, we traveled to Rwanda to report on the Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture or RICA. It's a university with an ambitious goal to transform how smallholder farmers grow food across the developing world by teaching sustainability and focusing on context-based solutions. Behind the university is the vision of its founder, Howard Buffett, businessman, philanthropist, and farmer.
Every country in Africa needs its own version, its own version of a land grant university.
To understand his approach to foreign aid, we met him where his own work begins on his family farm in Decatur, Illinois. This is Undertold Verbatim.
You've had an interest in Africa for many, many years. You've been to every country in Africa, I understand. Why did you choose Rwanda for the location of this university?
We had 20 or 25 countries we looked at. And actually the reason I thought it would be a great country to do this in is the absolute opposite of what most people would think. Most people would say, well, it's the second highest density in terms of population and land in the country. It's landlocked. It's the land of a thousand hills, right? So, you know, it's just not the place that you would gravitate to for agriculture. But that's in my opinion western thinking. So, I looked at Rwanda and I thought this is perfect. It's the most challenging environment we can have. There's almost the entire country is made up of smallholder farmers. It's critical they import and protect their water sources and if you look at the types of slopes they're farming on, you know, if we can get it right in Rwanda we can get it right anywhere. So to me, the fact that Rwanda didn't look like the right place to go to a lot of people that would look at it and say, 'Well, let's go farm somewhere.' You know, to me it was like, it's going to be harder for you to bring in a tractor and harder for you to bring in a plow to go with that tractor in Rwanda than it is a lot of other places. And we don't want to start with a tractor and a plow. We want to start with the farmer. What's he doing? How can we improve what he's doing? And how do we do that in the context of how that farmer lives and works? Not on our thinking in terms of how do we just make it bigger and faster.
I had a friend of mine ask me one time, 'What's the one thing you would do to change agriculture in Africa?' And not two or three. He said, 'Howie, give me one idea.' Well, I knew the idea, but our foundation couldn't afford to do it at the time. And the idea was to take the Morrill Land-Grant Act from 1862-64 here in the United States and take the principles of that and apply it in Africa so that you have your education, your research, but the key piece is the extension. So that's what's missing in most any educational institutions in Africa and I've been to a lot of them, I've seen a lot of them. We've tried to work with many of them and there are a few that work on that concept but they still work on it with the mindset of an academic and changing the mindset of an academic to how to practically apply something for a farmer on his farm or her farm is a very, very big challenge. And so the part that RICA will add is training farmers in conservation agriculture. And what that does for Rwanda is it saves our country. Eventually it saves our country because you can still find rivers in Rwanda unfortunately that run brown. And that's soil. And it's that simple. And so when you can keep the soil in place where it's supposed to be and you keep the best soil in place so that you don't erode away those that have the nutrients and the value in them. When you can keep that soil in place, you can increase your production, you can maintain your production and you can keep your water clean. So that's what RICA is about. RICA is about changing the outcome of the production of those smallholder farmers or medium or big farmers. It doesn't matter what size you are. The principles apply to every farmer.
To those of us who think that, you know, maize comes from the grocery store, what can you tell us what the Morrill Act did that accrued to farmers' benefit in the Midwest? 100 years ago. What did it do?
So you can have all the education and you can do all the research that you want, but when you can't take that and apply it on the farm, in my opinion, you've done very little. I mean, you might have accomplished something. I'm not saying that. I'm not trying to take that away from anybody who's achieved something. I'm just saying you didn't help the farmer. And so, you know, what the Morrill Act did was it created land grant universities on the concept that that education research would get transferred through extension to the farmer. So that was the big difference and it's been incredible in this country. I mean if you look at this country you have a soil book for every county. I can look at every person's farm and get a soil profile. That's where it starts because now you know what you have. Okay, you should know what you have when you're going to start and try to improve something.
So, it's all about getting the best intelligence to the grower, to the producer ultimately to help them produce more. And what you're trying to do is in addition to that at RICA develop an entrepreneurial spirit and drive among your students.
Let me address something you just said. To me, it's not about how do you get farmers to produce more. It's about how do you get farmers so that they can produce at the best level they can taking into consideration their cost so that they look at their net profit. And the second thing is their impact on the environment. Because when I think about when I walk out here on this farm, what's the most important thing I have? It's not my tractor. It's not my drill. It's not my combine. It's your soil. It's the soil that I'm standing on. So, how do I protect that?
In a lot of minds for people who might have thought about this in the west or in America, the idea of India comes up. You know, a place that was really struggling in the 1960s and it was science that turned it around in the form of what they call the green revolution in India. 50 years later, it's a surplus producer, but it has its problems. Why is that model, you think, unsuited for an African context?
Well, yeah, you're talking about the green revolution. And so it was science, but in my opinion it was incomplete science because they were looking at very specific areas that they could improve scientifically, but they didn't look at it in terms of a system. Farming is a system. And so if you only break out pieces of it, you can have success in those pieces. Look, some people have a great success in increasing some yields in Africa based on hybrid seeds, but we have three plots right over here across the road that I call our non-green revolution plots because I was at USDA one time having a discussion with a number of people and this gentleman insisted all you got to do is give them seeds. And I said, no, it's not that simple. I said, you know, you have to have a system to support every piece of what you try to change. And when you start changing things, there's always unintended consequences. So you have to be prepared that you can deal with those and solve the problems that come up. So to me, the green revolution is like almost anything else. It's got some great parts to it and it's got some really bad parts to it. And the really bad parts are that they did not focus enough on soil conservation, on soil health, on the impact of erosion on water systems. And so yeah, you can increase yields. I mean I can, you know, take the farm out here and figure out how to continue to increase yields, but how am I doing that? I'm doing it with technology that wouldn't even apply in Africa. Think of a farmer in the United States back in the 1920s or whenever. You go pick a year and go back and say, 'Okay, that's about when we had the same kind of yields.' We were still farming in a much more modern way than a lot of farmers are today in terms of smallholder farmers than they are today in Africa. And so if you think about it that way, how can you step into a situation and bring all sorts of mechanical and technical and scientific ideas and just kind of put them right there and say, 'Okay, now they're going to work.' Of course they're not going to work. You're thinking of one idea up here and you have to bring it way down here and think about what's happening today. How are those farmers surviving today? How are they working today? And how do you add value to what they're doing in their context? And so I think, you know, the green revolution had value in some things. And I think we're still building on some of those things that had value. But it also overlooked the fact that you need to understand the entire environment. You need to develop the process as a system of farming. And then you also have to think about the markets and the impact of if you move so quickly from a certain level of production to another level of production. You know, the markets can't always absorb that.
The conventional wisdom has it that when you develop farm yields, when you improve farm yields and you put systems in place, you get fewer and larger farms. That's certainly what happened in the Midwest. That's not what you hope will evolve based on all that comes out of RICA, you know, years and decades down the road, is it?
