4. The Southern Highlands: Crops, pigs and people in gas pipeline country

Continuing the story....pigs, people, the social dynamic and crops

Henry in his garden , Nogoli

Before I could do anything, I had to test my ideas with Oil Search Ltd community affairs staff and have a look at the landscape.  I thought it should be possible to grow a local crop to feed to pigs.  Everywhere else in the world people fed their pigs locally grown 

Part of Henry's family

wheat or corn or barley or sorghum or rice or cassava or waste food or byproducts.

Our local go to man was Henry, a Huli man with impeccable credentials.  He lived locally with four wives in their own house or village with a total of 18 children.  He was well known and well liked. He waved to everyone on the road because he knew them or they him or was related to them.

Pig production facilities need relatively level ground and vehicular access to pig houses, yet we were in the southern highlands.   There are mountains and rugged valleys here. Flat land is at a premium and in small parcels. Roads are few and far between. Even the main road, the highlands highway was in dreadful condition.  

It takes two days to drive the 700 kilometres winding, bone jarring mountain road from the port of Lae to the OSL Hides camp. It costs millions to build even a dirt road – about $1.5 million per kilometre in the highlands. Indeed, it costs as much to ship a tonne of corn up the highlands highway as it does to ship it from San Francisco to Lae. And you never know if a bridge will be down, the road blocked by an accident, a landslide,  by warring armed tribal clans or a group of young blokes collecting donations for the local village sports club or simply a contribution for them repairing a part of the road under the care of their village.

Janet's pigs Komo

We needed drinking water available ad libitum for the pigs.  Those that I had seen in village pig houses were watered by bucket once or twice each day but to optimize animal welfare,  intakes in a hot climate and optimize growth the pigs needed fresh water available all the time.

And I thought the project would be better located around Lae where we could access cassava but OSL was crystal clear, “Make the project work near Nogoli-Hides" where their oil and gas pipeline runs.

I had thought that the villagers might have had shared access to substantial tracts of land that they could organize to farm together.  It wasn’t the case.  One man might “own” 40 Hectares but it might be in a dozen parcels in disparate locations.  There might be a five-minute walk to the current sweet potato (kau kau) garden or it might take two hours.  There was a logic to this handed down from past generations.  In a hot climate where rainfall might be uncertain, increasing the chances of at least one garden getting decent rain to increase the chance of a crop meant locating the gardens over as wide an area as possible.  Good for subsistence survival but it didn’t help modern agronomic practice.  

The five minutes or two hours walk to the gardens was a walk for women.  Growing kau kau was women’s work. Carrying kau kau too apparently; in a bilum slung around the forehead and carried over the back.  Men and boys, even though unemployment was rife, did not get involved. The idea of different families sharing resources didn’t seem to be a possibility.  They were very individual in some things but very collective in others.

I knew from my work in Laos, Vietnam and East Timor and from experiences as an undergraduate in the Markham Valley that any project needed to be relatively straight forward and done step by step. As the PNG project idea developed we could see that we were ticking the Millennium Development Goals boxes easily but the business of trying to formally evaluate all these elements was very challenging. Indeed, for reasons of budget we later cut out formal evaluation.  In an Australian research environment, funding agencies often specifically request formal evaluation. In this case OSL just wanted B4D to get on with the job.  A qualitative evaluation was easy enough on a case study basis and that, together with market success or failure would have to be enough.

Village women preparing a field for  corn, Kuroba.

PNG villagers were very enthusiastic about their pigs, but I was unprepared, albeit delighted, to find out just how important they were. Villagers everywhere impressed upon me their pride in their animals.  Time and time again I was asked to photograph this pig with that villager or “me and my three pigs” all restrained by leg ropes and tied to a short stick driven into the ground or just running free.  In the gardens I saw a line of six or more happy women collaboratively digging the soil along with their two or three pigs who were rooting up the ground ahead of the shovels.  Six and seven year old daughters were caring for toddlers or babies (their sisters or cousins already on their hips). They were preparing gardens to plant corn; in this case in a new venture to produce shell corn under contract for poultry production.

Henry's workman was digging an 
effluent pit for the pig house.

Pigs have been raised in PNG for 5000 years and there were times I felt stupid thinking I might know something about this animal that might be new.  I was also worried about what might happen to local water supplies if, in the enthusiasm for the project, environmental controls went out the window. I also wanted to know about water storage, but I saw no tanks nor dams and came to the realization that before we could get any sort of pig production underway we had to consider water management and infrastructure.  As well as getting water to the pigs, disposing safely of excess water and effluent was a priority. 

Breaking open a roasting pig pit 
at Peter's house Tari

In East Timor the pig is very important and its regular inclusion as a festival animal boosts protein intake there.  In China, the character for house or home includes a drawing of a pig.  In PNG the cultural importance of the pig was raised to another level.  The pig is very main stream.  Coming from a western culture where the pork is the most consumed meat, but the animal often despised it was strange but also oddly satisfying to find this noble animal an important part of this society.  On one of our early trips to PNG we found ourselves on a little pig farm near Port Moresby admiring the animals with the owner, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and his colleague, the Attorney General. 

Nogoli-Hides is in Hela province in the southern highlands at an altitude of about 2100 metres.  It makes for a consistent climate and, because it’s not too hot should be good for pig reproduction. Hot weather depresses reproductive performance, but the cool nights and generally mild days of the highland areas mean they should do well there.  Down in the valleys where it does get hot there were mosquitos. They bring a range of diseases including some that involve pigs.  Japanese encephalitis virus, a disease spread by mosquitoes is prevalent in the region.  That virus is amplified largely asymptomatically in pigs, but it is fatal in humans who get infected.  Better not to take the risk producing pigs in the lower country where the people live right next door to their animals.  And therein lies an issue because cassava grows much better in hot climates than cool climates.  In the valleys we found some excellent cassava crops, but I didn’t want to risk the health of the local population by raising lots of pigs there.

Liam Flanagan (right) followed by John Cook crossing a
foot bridge across a ditch in a village near Komo.

To make up the project team I invited Liam Flanagan, an experienced pig production manager, to join me.  I had the necessary technical background, some ideas and could talk about things almost endlessly but Liam could do things.  We made an effective team.   We two were joined by John Cook, a former Kellog’s senior executive, Berri Fruit Juice CEO and now B4D consultant. 

Locating the project in the highlands meant we had to find a cost-effective energy source in the short term and a protein source in the medium term. We knew that it was possible to grow a range of legume crops in the highlands, but we had seen none, bar a few rows of beans, in the village gardens. Perhaps in the short term we could source a protein premix and ship it up from Lae until we could grow soya beans.

Kau Kua plants near Nogoli

Kau kau was grown in abundance.  Everywhere we went we saw village gardens planted to kau kau and growing, being harvested, being dug or the fresh vines being planted.  Kau kau is grown in a raised bed about 2.0 M * 1.5 M.  Each bed yields about 15 kg of kau kau.  After they have been harvested the beds are let lie fallow.  Generally, the villagers use new land for a variety of crops and then, as yields wane, they use that land for kau kau. Potential yields are between 20 - 40 tonnes per hectare but most crops yield about six tonnes per hectare.

The villages grew kau kau for themselves, fed it to their own pigs and closer to Hagen sold it to traders who shipped it to Port Moresby by the container load for sale there.  Average consumption per person is about 260Kg per person per year. All the work was done manually. Even though many hectares were grown, most families only grew enough for themselves.  In 2007 only 1% of the crop was sold but with increasing urbanization in Lae and Port Moresby the amount would change.  Market development was constrained by poor post-harvest processing and transportation.  Supply chains were fragmented. Post-harvest losses were high and in common with other tropical countries, a large proportion of product was unsaleable on arrival in the major markets due to rot and physical damage. 

A village meri moving her pigs.

There was no wider livestock market beyond the village pig. We saw pigs tethered to sticks, pigs in tiny houses not much bigger than the pigs, pigs in the Tari market tethered to sticks with their owner sitting close by under a big umbrella, pigs in trucks, pigs in line digging up garden plots that were being cultivated by village women, pigs being carried to where settlements for compensation were being negotiated and sows walking along the road with their meri (female owner) and often their piglets. I can’t recall seeing a boar.  There were a few sows with very small litters at foot. We became used to seeing 50 kg pigs that were a year old when, properly fed, they should have been that weight in 16 weeks. We saw quite fit and healthy pigs of about 100kg live weight that were in fact 2 years old – about four times as old for their weight given proper feeding and housing.

Kau kau was in plentiful supply. More, we were assured, could be grown. Pig production could be profitable if villagers could source feed at reasonable cost often from their own gardens and harvesting endeavours. The other key drivers were to feed balanced diets that enabled the pigs to grow and reproduce efficiently; to employ high standards of animal husbandry; use pig housing that facilitated rapid growth, high feed efficiency and easy pig handling; manage and recycle animal wastes into compost and sell healthy pigs and pork that was good to eat.

Village woman and her baby delivering
King grass to her pigs, Komo.

Profitable producers in PNG could be expected to behave as they had elsewhere in the world. They would reinvest in further production and output if it remained profitable. They would invest in new technologies to advance their margins. We observed that there was a heavy reliance on household labour with women likely to manage the )investment, but we worried that without the assistance of the men and boys they would not be able to cope. Women were already looking after food production in the gardens, preparing and cooking the meals, looking after the children, traveling to the local markets to buy and sell and looking after the chickens and pigs.  They were already busy.  Further, if young men refused to be involved then the work could fall to young women further denying them access to education.  This was in direct conflict to the MDGs. We were assured that the women could do the work.  “You leave that to us.”  Nonetheless we were asking them to farm their gardens to produce, in six months, 200 times their normal annual surplus of kau kau or 20 times their normal annual production just for one batch of ten pigs. When I expressed this concern, I was told not to worry, that the work would get done.  “That’s our problem, Ross.  Leave it to us,” they said quite firmly.

Pork for sale in Port Moresby

None of what we saw could really apply in the pig production model that I had thought up in my office in Ocean Grove, Victoria.  I wanted groups of pigs in one location that were identically housed, fed and very similar genetically. Here in the highlands I thought an arrangement where each villager produced about ten pigs at a time in her village pig house could make logistical sense vis a vis of supplying premixes, getting pigs to market, processing them and distributing them for sale.  I also needed numbers of pigs in one area to minimize the cost of feed, pig transport and servicing.

If we were to run a central sow farm, then we needed to rent the land or come to a contractual arrangement with a landowner, but we were quickly informed that the land wouldn’t be sold to us and that the idea of rent was foreign. Nonetheless the idea of growing pigs was very popular.  A 100 kg pig would fetch 3000 kina in Tari.  Henry and his colleagues were already doing the sums. Ten pigs each worth 3000 Kina. They were counting their money.  On the other hand, I saw an increase in output driving the price down.  To be able to sell pork at an affordable price for normal people with a job, the price had to come down.  It also had to come down to enable a processing group to compete in the market against other meats and against imported pork.  After all, why would a processor or consumer pay 3000 kina for a pig when they could buy one chopped up for about half that in Port Moresby or from a container shipped up from Lae for not much more.

The arrivals area Tari airport

A pig industry in the Southern Highlands possessed some attractive scale. Our enquiries revealed there are 40,000 households in the total Southern Highlands region. From what we observed it was common for there to be on average at least three pigs per household. On this basis, pig numbers within the Southern Highlands would be about 120,000 animals and we suspect about 60,000 in the OSL “Nogoli-Hides neighbourhood”.  There are an estimated 360,000 people living in the Southern Highlands.  If this project lifts pork consumption through increased availability and competitive pricing by just two kilograms per person each year in this high growth area of PNG that translates to an extra demand for about 12000 pigs.  If the sows can produce 12 pigs per year that translates to a business requiring about 1000 sows. You could see that demand coming through the people flying in and out of the Tari airport on multiple flights each day.

In the next blog we explore the idea that the Highlands community will embrace a new piggery business. The market for fresh pork is growing and under supplied.  We are confident that international pig production bench marks can be approached in the highlands. And we conclude that diet, pig management and training issues must be addressed through further research and testing.