Home > Case studies > You are here
The link between Australia and Libya began as a series of fortunate accidents.
In the 1970s there was some knowledge of Australian legume pastures in Europe and America and within the international agricultural organisations.
The "sub and super" formula that had been used so successfully on the parcour and the cereal areas of Australia with acid or neutral soils was well known.
It had begun early in the 20th century and some knowledge had seeped through by the 1950s and 1960s.
Australia is remote from European and US centres and the knowledge tended to emphasise the plants rather than the farming system in which they were used.
Unfortunately the simplicity of the name was also a barrier as experts did not realise that the sub and super formula could be converted to medic and super for alkaline soils. They saw it as having limited application to the WANA region.
Medics were less well known as they had only gathered momentum in Australia in the 1950s.
The FAO book "Legumes in Agriculture" published in 1953 mentions medic but gives much more detailed attention to sub clover.
The concepts of a medic farming system were unknown outside Australia.
Both sub clover and medic were considered to be just another group of legumes and their special properties and management needs were not understood.
No one in the main organisations such as FAO seemed to think that there could be a useful link between the Mediterranean regions of Australian and the WANA region.
There were Australian agronomists working in FAO and other international organisations but they failed to spot the climatic and soil similarities.
The breakthrough for Libya was when a group of Libyan graduates were sent to Australia with FAO sponsorship to study wool technology.
While the world may not have recognised Australia's unique contribution to legume pastures they did accept that Australia had developed a highly sophisticated system of grading and handling wool from the farm to the buyer.
It was thought that this system could be transferred to Libya.
Of course any detailed knowledge would have shown the Australian system was totally irrelevant. Australian farmers produced short staple, fine wool for the production of high quality woollen textiles in England and Italy.
The Libyan farmers produced meat from their sheep with strong, long staple wool as a bye-product used mainly in hand woven textiles and knotted carpets.
The Libyan students quickly realised the lack of relevance of their wool technology courses in Australian agricultural colleges.
Fortunately they were observant and curious about Australian farming.
They realised that the pastures which allowed such large numbers of sheep to be grazed and such high production to be achieved were more relevant.
They also saw Australian farmers sowing large areas of cereals with shallow cultivation.
They carried this knowledge back to Libya.
When they returned to Libya they were thrown directly into the development process.
Libya was receiving increased oil revenues in the early 1970s and was investing heavily in agriculture. Development Authorities were set up in the east and west.
They had many functions but here I will concentrate on their agricultural work.
In the west the Jefara Plains Authority was given many large blocks of land (each block being some thousands of hectares) in the marginal part of the cereal zone with rainfall of 150 to 250 mm.
The authority employed the Western Australian Department of Agriculture to develop these blocks as medic-cereal or in the case of the very dry areas more or less continuous medic.
They were developed as large turnkey projects.
Large scale machinery was imported from Australia.
A camp was established with a permanent team of technicians and Australian farmers were flown in for cultivation and seeding work each year.
In the east the Jebel al Akhdar Authority adopted a different model.
The land had a higher rainfall (about 350 mm) and better soil than the poor sand of the east.
The land had been cleared of low scrub by the Italian occupiers in the 1920s and 1930s and Italian farmers settled on 30 and 40 ha farms.
These farms had been abandoned and some land had reverted to scrub.
It was cleared using contractors, new farms of 80 to 100 ha were established with new farm houses.
These were allocated to Libyan farmers.
The medic system was first introduced by Australian farmers working for the South Australian Seedgrowers Cooperative.
They had sold the medic seed to the Authority and they were asked to provide farmer demonstrators to sow the seed and to demonstrate the new shallow cultivation machinery for cereals.
A little later the Authority approached the South Australian Department of Agriculture to establish a Demonstration Farm.
The farm was to carry out some applied research and provide a demonstration area for extension work.
It was referred to as the 1000 ha Demonstration Farm but the area varied (it consisted of a group of the land reform farms) and never reached 1000 ha.
The Australian technical staff lived in the houses built for the future Libyan farmers and the Australian farmers lived in hotels or as guests of Libyan farmers.
Progress on the turnkey projects in the west was rapid.
Large areas of medic pasture were established.
Cereals were sown in rotation.
Yields of cereals were more than double the local averages and sheep number increase by an even greater amount.
The high quality pasture meant output per sheep (lambing percentages and weight of lambs) increase at the same time.
Towards the end of the 1970s the Libyan government began the process of dividing the big blocks into family farms and allocating them to Libyan farmers.
This proved difficult as the Libyan farmers had been excluded from the project from the beginning and had little knowledge of the medic farming system.
Technically one can say that the project was hugely successful.
In economic and social terms less so.
The costs were naturally high compared to returns because of the imported labour and the project was for most of its life totally isolated from the Libyan farming community.
In the east the Libyan farmers were in control from the beginning.
The Australian farmers were advisers.
Most of the effort was put into establishing medic pastures and cereal crops but some farmers stayed the whole year to provide advice on grazing.
Progress was slower but more firmly based in the local farming community.
Again increases in livestock production were the star performer but cereals improved also.
The South Australian Department of Agriculture Demonstration Farm provided support to the Australian farmers from the Seedgrowers Cooperative.
There were some excellent Libyan farmers who achieved high stocking rates and high output per sheep.
Many also had excellent cereal crops.
These farmers were criticised in the the People's Committee on Agriculture as being too prosperous and there were threats of further land division as these farms could support more than one family.
Not all farmers were so successful and others plainly failed.
In the east there were also some large scale projects in the rangeland.
The Director of the Authority realised the possibilities of sowing large areas with medic in the rangeland using conventional Australian seeding equipment.
The Benghazi plain was the first venture.
Thousand of hectares of medic were sown into the traditional grazing land in a single season.
The rains were good.
The growth of medic prolific and in a moment of hubris it was decided to cut the medic for thousands of tonnes of hay.
The traditional flockowners were angry as they were denied access to this rich pasture and vented their anger by burning much of the hay.
The Director of the Authority, Bashir Jodeh quickly learnt from this example and further rangeland sowing on the southern side of the Jebel at Wadi Karouba and Wadi al Bab were linked with land settlement and grazing programs.
Unlike the east there was no attempt to fence and exclude the local flockowners nor were the Australians used to carry out the work. Again they acted as advisers.
A much more comprehensive description to the Libyan development of medic farming is provided in Sustainable Dryland Farming by Lynne and Brian Chatterton, Cambridge University Press 1996.
The greatest strength of the Libyan model was their adoption of the complete medic package.
Both the Development Authorities introduced medic pastures, shallow cultivation with Australian machinery designed for that task and Australian farmers to put the whole package together on the ground.
They used two different sub models.
In the west the medic was established first and once the system was operating successfully the land was divided into land reform farms for Libyans.
In the east the land reform program was already under way. Medic was established on existing Libyan farms.
There was no doubt that the adoption of the complete package contributed to the rapid success of the system at the technical level.
Whether the Libyan managers realised the link between shallow cultivation and medic regeneration is not known.
The link is usually attributed to Ted Carter's work for FAO in assessing the failure of their Algerian project in the mid 1970s after the Libyan projects were well under way.
I think the Libyans saw the success of shallow cultivation in Australia and decided to adopt it because it was cheap and effective.
The Australian farmers in the east proved to be remarkably good extension agents and demonstrators in spite of they almost total lack of Arabic.
They were able to establish good medic farming systems on many hundreds of Libyan farms through their own practical demonstration.
Other countries and traditional development experts were scornful of the Libyans as they believed that the leap into development without earlier research and the purchase of machinery and seed on such a large scale was risky.
They thought the use of Australian farmers extravagant.
The Libyans proved them wrong.
Costs may have been high but the rapid success meant the pay back was quick and considerable.
Compared to other countries that adopted a more conventional fragmented approach the cost - benefit ratios were much better.
This may seem strange but the very success of the Australian farmers meant they were left to get on with it with very little support.
They were at times provided with an interpreter but rarely a counterpart.
The Libyan trained agronomists were in short supply and were used to plug other gaps in the development program which included fruit trees, vines and bees.
The Development Authorities were involved in many activities besides medic and cereals.
They lacked experienced staff.
The Australians were doing well so the staff was used elsewhere. When the Australians left there were few Libyans trained to take over.
The Australian farmers and technicians had no experience of the Libyan system of grazing flocks with shepherds.
In the west they fenced the land into fields and used Australian grazing methods.
In the east the Libyan farms had a boundary fence but internally shepherds were used.
It was surprising that the Australians did not make any attempt to modify their ideas to suit this system of grazing.
The grazing management concepts incorporated in this web site came from the experiences of farmers in North Africa not from Australians working in the region.
At an official level the emphasis was on cereals.
Farmers made more money from sheep even though cereals were heavily subsidised.
Later when Libyan farmers were placed under banking restrictions the advantage of sheep became even greater as they could be sold for cash and the money kept under the bed and out of the banking system.
Libyan officials, like their colleagues in the North African region at the time, saw the 500 to 250 mm zone as the cereal zone and found it difficult to adjust their mental framework to seeing it as the cereal - sheep zone once medic pasture had been established.
Given the high price of sheep meat the emphasis should have been placed on the sheep with cereals taking a secondary role.
The Development Authorities lacked trained Libyan staff.
The Libyan universities were producing trained agronomists but the medic system had not yet entered their training.
I can recall meeting Bashir Jodeh, the Director of the Jebel al Akhdar Development Authority before he became Minister of Agriculture, and him complaining that the local graduates were all trained in European and US agricultural principles and the Authority had to knock some sense into them on the job.
Others had done post graduate training overseas - not in Australia - and were even more of a problem.
This was certainly not a weakness at the time but proved to be later.
Medic seed came from Australia.
There was no attempt to produce it locally.
This was a sound economic decision as the comparative advantage of Australia in producing cheap seed was considerable.
Libyan farmers could never have produced a profit from seed from a medic pasture compared to meat production.
The price of meat was very high and it was obvious that pastures were better utilised for grazing rather than seed.
The farm machinery came from Australia because there was no other source of equipment for shallow cultivation.
The pace of development during the peak period of the 1970s was frantic and insufficient records were kept.
This is particularly true of the rangeland work.
While the Syrian hema system described by Draz in many publications appears in every report written for every international organisation on the WANA rangeland the Libya innovations are never mentioned.
They are of equal importance.
While the hema system attempted with limited success to tackle the problem of grazing management it did nothing to tackle the problem of under-pasturing.
The Libyan projects developed large areas of pasture quickly and showed the possibilities of a quantum leap in production being a solution to grazing management problems also. (see Rangeland management)
In the 1980s Libyan agricultural investment changed direction.
Less was spent on dryland agriculture and more on irrigation particularly the Great Man Made River.
The involvement of Australian teams of farmers was reduced.
The Australian technicians were withdrawn.
Medic seed was purchased for a while but not farm machinery.
Gradually even spare parts became difficult.
It is not possible to identify a single cause. There were many contributory factors.
There was a decline in investment in agriculture and the emphasis moved to the Great Man Made River.
Lack of investment was first evident in the withdrawal of Australian farmer and technical support.
Then machinery, seed and spare parts were withdrawn.
The imposition of trade sanction on Libya caused considerable problems as Australian companies were much more timid than their US and European competitors and were reluctant to break official rules.
Machinery purchases from Australia were replaced with deep ploughing and cultivating equipment from Europe and USA.
Bashir Jodeh said the medic system never penetrated the universities and other institution.
Each new generation of graduates had to be trained on the job.
As the system became weaker new generations were not trained on the job and reverted to the European and US ideas they learnt at university or overseas.
There is no doubt this had an enormous effect.
He was a most dynamic and able Minister of Agriculture and the momentum of the medic system declined after his death.
The medic system was launched in 1972-3.
By 1982 it had achieved remarkable progress but only the early adopters had ten years of experience.
Most farmers had less.
In the east the task of breaking up the large turn key projects had only just begun.
When one compares the time scale with Australia where the progress from 1935 to 1950 was slow and then the system expanded greatly in the period 1950 to 1970 it is easy to see that the Libyan farmers needed a longer period for the system to become fully established.
Australia also had the advantage that shallow cultivation was the standard means of seedbed preparation for more than 100 years and was not under constraint attack from implements designed for deep ploughing.
The multinational machinery companies that operate in Australia sell equipment for shallow cultivation but in the WANA region they sell implements for deep ploughing.
While the Libyan medic program was active the farmers were supplied with the correct equipment but as it went into decline at the government policy level equipment purchases reverted to the standard deep ploughs and chisels used in Europe.
The Libyan farmers were keen to continue with medic and aware of the difficulties.
Various missions to Libya led by ACSAD and others reported on the farmers' requests for medic seed, seeders and scarifiers for shallow cultivation.
The short period of time for the implementation of a totally new farming system had another impact.
The adoption of the complete package by the Libyans including the use of Australian farmers had made the system look very easy.
One of the effects of the cereal - fallow rotation or continuous cereal is the low level of weeds.
If medic is sown into these soils with low fertility and low weed infestation in a professional way the results are dramatic.
Excellent weed free pasture can be established are highly productive.
Over time weeds will increase and weed control in both the pasture and cereal crop becomes more difficult. Farmers
in Libyan needed a second stage of "advanced training" to keep the medic system operating at optimum efficiency.
One of the difficulties with the growing weed problem is that it is often easier to break the weed cycle with a fallow of some other break crop and start the rotation again.
This does require more medic seed which was not available.