Report on August Trip to the Olkhon Raion of Lake Baikal

To: Friends of the E. F. Schumacher Society

From: Susan Witt

Date: September 27, 1995

Dimitry drove us to La Guardia early in the morning of August 8th. I returned August 27th with armloads of good memories. The travel through China to Irkutsk in Siberia was long and hard, but the ten days spent in the Olkhon Raion were productive and fun. We went swimming in Lake Baikal nearly every day, visited Buryat farmers in their homes, picked wild berries in the taiga, watched hawks on the steppes, raked hay at Volodya's farm, steamed in the banya, saw cows grazing on water lilies, ate freshly dug potatoes and freshly caught omul, joined the audience at the school in Khuzir for a 50th anniversary pageant, milked Masha the cow, made countless offerings to the gods of the lake and earth and elements, and were generally feted and spoiled. Thanks to everyone who helped with this project.

OLKHON PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS

• The village of Tolovkah was founded during Russia's civil war and later in the 30's became a state farm. The state farm has been abandoned, but the 160 villagers continue an active subsistent lifestyle, raising sheep and cows, fishing, and producing what food they can locally. The village totals some 700 hectares with extensive hay and grain fields. It is located where the taiga and steppe meet, so has timber, berries and mushrooms as resources in addition to the rich grazing land of the steppes. It has a newly built elementary school, a store, a hall, and a memorial site along with the private houses.

  Adjoining Tolovkah are two new farms, settled by Buryat families who were given exclusive use rights of the land because they could prove that their ancestors farmed that land. One is headed by an energetic and enterprising farmer named Mels.

  I visited Mels in 1992 and he had only a newly built shack with rain leaking through the roof to house his wife, mother, father, and two sons. But he took us to the door and said, "Look out there, you will see a Buryat village." We visited Mels on this trip and he now has a large permanent home, several barns, extensive corrals, a root storage cellar, other processing and storage facilities, and many hectare under new cultivation.

  Several families from the village of Tolovkah are ready to join Mels at the new location. Mels has worked long and hard for this moment, but he does not know how best to organize the common participation. When he heard about the community land trust from the E. F. Schumacher Society's February delegation, he realized that the land trust would provide for a means of private investment and private ownership of buildings without dividing the land of the new village. He talked with people in Tolovkah and with Volodya Markasaev, director of the Olkhon Center for Sustainable Agriculture. As a result, the village of Tolovkah has requested help to establish itself as a model community land trust. The trust would include the village land, land now settled by Mels, and an adjoining farm of breathtaking beauty that flows down a valley and to the shore of Lake Baikal. This third site is now farmed by a traditional Buryat family who speak only Buryat, a family with strong ties to Tolovkah.

  Needless to say, I was thrilled with this development. I had anticipated spending my time in the Olkhon Raion knocking at the doors of village mayors to describe the advantages to the village of serving as a model community land trust. Instead Tolovkah came to us out of practical need. During the next four months we will prepare and submit a proposal to foundations to fund a professional land use and legal team to travel to the Olkhon Raion in August of 1996. The team will work for a month with Russian counterparts and the people of Tolovkah to develop the documents for a community land trust, homestead by homestead.

  Walt Cudnohufsky, founder of the Conway School of Landscape Design, and Harry Conklin, lawyer for the Community Land Trust in the Southern Berkshires have agreed to go. I was also approached by a Great Barrington architect who has offered to join the delegation at his own expense.

• Thanks to a loan from a Schumacher Society member, the Olkhon Center for Sustainable Agriculture has established a fund for small productive loans. It made its first three hundred dollar loan while we were in Yelantsi to a woman with six years experience as a seamstress in a factory in the city of Ulan Ude. She is now back in her home village of Yelantsi, married, with a three year old daughter. The loan is for a sewing machine so that she can start a sewing business from her home. It will mean that the women of the village can choose the style and color of their clothes rather than rely on the very limited choice sold by street vendors. The loan is for two years with monthly payments in rubles calculated at their US dollar equivalent.

   

• The order for 400 socks and mittens was not filled because, as Lyuba Markasaev learned, Buryat women do not knit during the late spring and summer, even if it means additional income for the family. They are too busy with their gardens, with their animals, with hay making, and with berry gathering. Knitting is traditionally done during the long cold winters. The order has been extended until April when representatives from Ecologically Sustainable Development, our sponsoring organization for USAID funding, will again be in the Olkhon Raion. A few mittens and socks were delivered for a show and tell to a visiting group of US Senators reviewing USAID sponsored projects.

   

• Volodya said that the biggest problem for private farmers in the Raion was to find a way to process their wool locally. When the large state sheep farms were operational, the small farmers could take their fleeces to the state farm to add to the shipment destined for the central wool processing plant in Ulan Ude, a two day truck ride from the Olkhon Raion.

  E. F. Schumacher Society board member, Bill Schrenk, and his wife, Kay, live in Falls Village, Connecticut, where they tend a herd of 40 sheep. They and many other New England sheep farmers with similar size flocks, take their wool to a small processing plant in Putney, Vermont. The plant has the appropriate scale technology to handle small batches of wool. Bill is arranging a meeting with the manager of the plant in October, so that we can explore a similar system for Olkhon.

• Based on a suggestion that I made in an April letter to Olkhon Center for Sustainable Agriculture staff, Anatoli Duksuyev, the Center's assistant director, produced a 30 page hand written paper recording the Buryat techniques for slaughtering animals, preparing meat and skin, and storing the product. Sheep are central to Buryat culture and taking the life of a sheep is traditionally practiced only with great gentleness and respect for the animal. Anatoli captured this spirit in his paper. He is also concerned that none of the sheep is wasted. As an engineer he prepared detailed construction drawings for underground meat storage facilities based on operating examples from farms in the Raion.

  Anatoli and his family live on Olkhon Island where there is electricity only 2 days per week. His wife worked as a secretary in Irkutsk before her marriage. We allocated USAID funds to buy the Center a manual typewriter so that she can type Anatoli's paper. It will then be copied in Yelantsi with the new copier purchased for the Center's office. The board of directors of the Center will circulate copies in their villages. We will also submit it for publication in Novii Sadavod and Fermer, the widely read Russian language magazine published by Rodale Press.

  The Buryats are historically nomadic people and vegetable cultivation is relatively new to them. Limited communication services in the Olkhon Raion and distances between farming communities have hindered the transfer of information. The predominance of large state farms for most of this century interrupted the generational sharing of skills that occurs on small farms. Even with these obstacles we found that there are excellent farmers in the Raion, many practicing age-old Buryat methods and some developing innovative techniques suitable for new crops and the climate conditions of Olkhon. One of the important roles of the Olkhon Center for Sustainable Agriculture will be to collect and distribute information about these proven agricultural practices to encourage greater self-sufficiency in food production for the Raion.

  Volodya and I asked Anatoli and his wife, Lyuba Duksuyev to act as directors of publications for the Center and to systematically record the experiences of the best farmers in the Raion with special emphasis on traditional Buryat methods. They are enthusiastic to do this. They are an enterprising and capable family. The most memorable meal we had was at the Duksuyevs, pan fried omul fresh from Lake Baikal and roasted new potatoes-simple and elegant.

FUNDING

Funding for the E. F. Schumacher Society's work in the Olkhon Raion on the west shore of Lake Baikal has come from various sources. Primary funding for the staff of the Olkhon Center for Sustainable Agriculture and the office in Yelantsi has come from a grant from USAID administered by Ecologically Sustainable Development which has projects throughout the Lake Baikal watershed. USAID funding for the Center will continue through August of 1998. USAID funds also supported the February delegation, communication expenses, and some administrative costs of the E. F. Schumacher Society during the first year of work at Lake Baikal. Primary funding for the Schumacher Society's work in coordinating the project has come from the Weeden Foundation and from the generous donations of members of the Society. The Trust for Mutual Understanding paid travel expenses for this summer's delegation to the Olkhon Raion and also paid travel costs for Abigail Breuer's summer 1994 trip for the Schumacher Society to make final contract arrangements with Buryat staff. The Great Barrington Rotary Club and other members of the Great Barrington community have donated household items, canning equipment, office supplies, and medical supplies that were very much appreciated by the Olkhon community. Delegation members have donated their time and heart-felt attention to the land and people of Olkhon.

The Schumacher Society will turn to foundations to fund the expenses of the summer 1996 delegation to Tolovkah and to pay the salaries of a Russian legal and land-use planning team. It will take approximately two months of office time to adequately arrange all details for the 24 field days at Tolovkah. We welcome your continued support.