If You Grow It, They Will Buy It

Iowa National Guard is sending  an agriculture team to Afghanistan.  I’ve already gotten to meet some of these guys (not from Iowa, but other teams), and I’m convinced that agriculture is the key to success here in this country.

There’s a strong history of farming in Afghanistan, with some crops that apparently do really well in certain areas.

Of course, opium’s one of those crops, and 2007 was a bumper year, apparently.
Which means the work of the Iowa teams and others is additionally challenging…not only do they need to help the Afghans retool and rework some of their basic farming practices, they need to help them understand that they need to say “no” to drugs.

Tough to do when you made decent money off the poppies, and the market for other legal products, if the market exists, isn’t nearly as robust as it is for your particular heroin plant.
Overall, these are guys with actual experience in their field, working with agriculture in the US in varying capacities for years worth of accumulated experience, unlike other enterprises here where it’s fairly ad hoc and made up of warm bodies to fill a position.

Additionally, colleges are committing to putting ag teams in places over the course of years, something that’s going to help that whole continuity piece that’s generally missing from experiences here…the Army and other entities are only here for short periods of time, and institutional knowledge tends to get lost in the massive shuffle of incoming and outgoing units.
Someday Afghan fruits and nuts will be on the shelves somewhere in the supermarket. Hope I get to see it happen before I leave here someday.