A WSU soil scientist whose roots are in West Africa finds success helping farmers in the arid lands of eastern Afghanistan.

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Remarkable story

Knowledge has been key to Badini’s own remarkable story. He spent his childhood on a subsistence farm in West Africa’s Burkina Faso, one of the poorest nations in the world with a per capita income close to that of Afghanistan. There, he helped herd his family’s goats and cows, and tended to fields of sorghum, millet and maize amid a deepening drought in the Sahel region.

His parents put a focus on education, and Badini as a teenager left his rural home to attend a French lycee, then a university in Ouagadougou, where he obtained an agricultural-engineering degree.

In 1991, while directing a farming research program in his home country, Badini received a scholarship to study in the Northwest, and by 1997 gained his doctorate in soil sciences at Washington State University.

The university is in the middle of the Palouse, a prime wheat-growing area where farms produce some of the highest yields in the world. Erosion is a key concern there, and Badini got involved as a graduate student in WSU efforts to reduce tillage and soil loss.

The university also, since 1954, has maintained an international focus, drawing nearly $200 million in grants over the years for overseas development work. Those programs enabled Badini to return to his homeland in the late 1990s.

For more than a decade, he shuttled back and forth between Pullman, where he and his wife raised their two children, and West Africa, where he worked to improve farming practices.

Then in 2011, Badini visited Afghanistan to conduct two weeks of training on soil sciences, and was impressed by the warmth of the people in a country that shared his Muslim faith. The next year, he shifted his focus as the university secured a new grant to improve farming in the eastern provinces.

“We got this project, and we were sitting around here at Pullman at the office saying. ‘Now we got to find somebody who wants to work in Jalalabad,’ ” said Chris Pannkuk, a WSU colleague who directs the Office of International Agricultural Research & Development.

“And Oumarou said, ‘I will try it out for a little while.’ ”

Immersed in nation

Now, Badini spends about 11 months of the year in Afghanistan, and divides his month off between West Africa, to visit with relatives, and Pullman, where his wife lives.

While in Jalalabad, Badini dons the traditional shalwar kameez worn by Afghan men that hangs loosely from his tall, thin frame as he check outs the crops in the renovated test plots.

Some of the field trials have demonstrated simple changes in techniques that can yield big results.

One plot, for example, featured corn grown in evenly spaced, raised rows, producing more than twice the yield of another plot that replicated the traditional Afghan practice of casting seeds out into flat fields.

Nearby, pits dug into the earth turn crop residues and weeds into an organic soil at much faster rates than traditional piles.

The Afghan extension agents learn by setting up and monitoring these plots. Then they head out into surrounding districts to share their knowledge with farmers who have dedicated part of their land as “field schools” to replicate the trials.

“The truth is that most of the people never really sat and caressed a plant leaf, looked at it and tried to understand what is going on,” Badini said. “Why is this color like this? Why is this type of insect crowding on those leaves? Why are these weeds here? So you start asking those questions.”

Wheat is a big focus, with Badini sharing conservation techniques that reduce tillage. But even as farmers embrace these techniques they are limited by a lack of small, specialized tractors that can plant the seeds without first plowing the fields.

The outreach also is limited by security concerns, with at least six of 22 districts in Nangarhar province now off-limits due to the Taliban and militants with the Islamic State group. And even in Jalalabad, the situation is more tense, so Badini limits his movements.

In the city, his home is a mansion with entryway pillars and marbled staircases built in the “poppy palace” style of architecture that got its name from drug barons who favor such construction.

With 13 bedrooms, there is plenty of space for other WSU staff members who sometimes come to assist him. His own room is just off the roof, where he maintains a kitchen garden that includes lettuce, cabbage, tomatoes, strawberries and a menagerie of birds that offer some company.

But Badini doesn’t like being confined to quarters, no matter how upscale, and thrives on his trips to the fields.

In a telephone interview after his return to Afghanistan in May, Badini talked about a recent visit to an agricultural university where he had helped set up plots so that 75 students could run their own crop trials.

“This was the first time they had such field practice,” Badini said. “I’m very happy about this. These are the future extension workers.”