Lassané Savadogo

In a context where farmers’ inability to store produce after harvest unnecessarily leads to a “hungry season,” Lassané Savadogo has created an affordable and effective storage practice that is allowing families to not only feed themselves year round, but to earn incomes double what is common during the off season.

Lassané initiates and promotes technical and financial innovations that are accessible for producers, the majority of whom are small scale. After more than a decade of on the ground testing, Lassané has found two grassroots solutions that create effective and affordable storage for small farmers cultivating the most significant staple crops in relatively extreme year round conditions.

The first solution Lassané developed channels air through windows in a small building above ground, down a stairway into a three-meter below-ground cavern that sits next to (not below) the above ground structure. The cavern structure’s length and width varies, depending on the amount of storage required. It requires a dimension of 6.2 x 3.5 meters of horizontal dimension and 3 meters of depth. Connected to the wall opposite the staircase is a horizontal vent connected to a separate shaft that is 3.5 meters deep and has a diameter of a half meter. To fine tune the temperature inside the basement when surface temperatures are at their highest, Lassané puts a small amount of water in the base of the ventilation shaft and uses small amounts of water to moisten the roof above the sub-surface basement.

The second replicable solution is for the storage of onions. In outward appearance, the storage unit looks much like a traditional granary, but it is designed in such a way that it promotes air circulation, which is critical to keeping the interior of the granary at an acceptable temperature. The legs of the granary, for example, are hollow and made out of metal to allow air to circulate up through the floor. In the same way the wall of the granary is two walls, with 10 centimeters of space between the walls to channel the air inwards in a spiral. Design modifications to the roof allow air to escape upward and prevent infrequent rain from entering. The granary Lassané has developed is capable of storing 3 tons of onions for 4 to 6 months or 1.5 tons for up to 8 months, with a spoilage rate of not more than 6 to 8 percent.

The conditions in northern Burkina Faso, despite high temperatures and aridity, support irrigated and cultivated crops such as potatoes, onions, sweet potatoes, and yams during a growing season from June to August. Production of these crops far outstrips the needs of the local population and in August, this region becomes a significant exporter. The problem in this scenario is that local farmers have had to sell—effectively dump—this produce onto the market all at once because they have had no economic way to store the produce and resell intermittently throughout the year. As a result, the regional price for potatoes, for example, reaches as low as 200 cfa (US$0.45) per kg at the time of harvest, but increases 100 percent within several months, and triples or quadruples during the low season when produce from the previous growing season has begun to spoil and the region becomes a net food importer.

The low season or hungry season can be especially devastating as farmers, lacking much choice, often find themselves accepting short-term loans from opportunistic money lenders to purchase expensive imported food. The exchange for these loans is the right of the money lender to purchase the farmer’s next crop at highly discounted prices.

The challenge around crop storage in northern Sahel is rather intricate. Solutions have to maintain a constant storage temperature (e.g. 25 to 27 degrees centigrade for potatoes, sweet potatoes and yams, and somewhat higher temperatures for onions). They have to work in extreme conditions, as cold storage is unavailable and local dry season daytime temperatures routinely reach 45 degrees Celsius. They have to be “off grid” and at the same time simple enough to build and maintain so that local farmers can do it, rather than rely on a third, sometimes expensive, party. They also have to be customizable in a local context. For example, some small farmers want a potato storage solution for 2 tons, others for 5 or 8. And finally, the solutions need to be affordable in terms of financial and non-financial investment required of the farmers.

As the founder of the Professional Association of Market Gardeners in Yatenga (ASPMY), Lassané describes the strategy of the organization as “developing innovations inspired by ancient techniques to which we add a touch of modernity” such as the inclusion of modern materials like cement and iron posts to vastly increase the durability of such techniques. These innovations are experimented on the scale of a farmer over several years, which allows for their perfection and to measure their performance. Once the innovation is proven, ASPMY moves on to a phase of popularization by instituting it in a cross-section of different zones of production. As head of innovations, Lassané makes himself available to producers during the acquisition of equipment. He then reflects on any difficulties that arise and improves the technology to make it more efficient and/or more adapted to the local context. Lassané’s innovation in potato and onion storage mimics this trajectory.

After having tried tens of different innovations over many years, two recently gave him satisfying results. Lassané immediately got to work popularizing the potato cavern by targeting farmers who had been early adopters of other innovations in his region. He then used his own savings to build the first cavern and invited the farmers to store their potatoes with him until they could save enough money from the higher income earned on stored potatoes to build potato caverns of their own—effectively providing free rent for a portion of their crop. Up and downsizing the model requires modifications in the dimensions of the interior that circulates air through the underground cavern, as well as modifications in the subsurface dimensions of the cavern. Lassané provides these calculations to interested farmers free of charge, and he has trained a local construction team to build the caverns to fit expressed needs. Lassané has been contacted by farmers’ associations from across Burkina who know him well and follow the progress of his work. So far, his exact designs have been replicated several times within this group, and modified versions are being created by farmer/entrepreneurs in the region.

The cavern can be built for approximately US$7,000 and can store up to 10 tons of potatoes, yams, and sweet potatoes for 6 months. At 200 cfa per kg, a farmer earns between US$3,500 and $4,000 for 10 tons of potatoes. When the price of potatoes doubles off its seasonal low of 200 cfa per kg to 400 cfa per kg, the same 10 tons has a market value of US$7,000 to $8,000, and at the upper end of the price range during the hungry season the value increases to US$11,000 to US$12,000. Farmers’ family economics vary, but Lassané has designed it in such a way that the incremental income from the cavern can return the equivalent of the capital cost of the cavern in two to three years.

Lassané’s strategy for potato conservation went in a slightly different direction when he received a grant from the World Bank that provided financing to farmers for the construction of 200 onion granaries. To date, ASPMY has helped install 220 facilities of at least 4,000 it believes is needed in the region. The financial model for the onions is similar in cost to that of the potato cavern, at US$7,000 for a version that will last ten years. Another version made out of 100 percent local materials can also be built for less than half that cost, but Lassané’s tests find the structure’s durability is limited to three years.

Lassané also noticed that price fluctuation and repayment of capital on onion sales is somewhat better than for potatoes. His experience with the onion granaries is that, as farmers’ incomes rise from delayed onion sales they use their new found discretionary purchasing power to purchase home improvements, which attracts the interest of local banks—effectively moving the farmers from unbanked to banked. Lassané believes that as the banks become comfortable with lending to the farmers for housing construction, they will gradually become comfortable lending for the construction of fixed assets such as onion storage and potato storage units.

Thinking beyond Yatenga and Zondoma, the two provinces in which the storage huts can currently be found, Lassané has 6-, 12-, and 18-month plans to systematically spread to all of the provinces in Burkina Faso. In pursuit of this goal, ASPMY is currently entering these regions and sensitizing and exhibiting demonstrations of the technology. ASPMY is also identifying other associations of producers, such as PAFASP, PROFIL, and ATP to play a more deliberate role.

When Lassané was a boy he began experimenting by suggesting his father plant some mango trees; so they could be “less poor” in the future. Rather than wait for the trees to grow, Lassané planted vegetables around the mango trees to more efficiently utilize the water he was providing to the trees.

As a young man, Lassané divided his time between religious studies in Burkina, Togo, the Ivory Coast and gardening. He found that, whether he was involved in gardening or learning Arabic he followed the path of a student-teacher-entrepreneur. With his Arabic studies he formed small study groups, earning money for language instruction and teaching teachers. In market gardening he absorbed lessons from cultivating fruits and vegetables, experimenting with what he had learned and in turn, taught it to others and directly through farmers’ associations.

In 1980 Lassané was doing his own field experiments, contributing to the growth of potato cultivation in northern Burkina. In the last ten years, his attention turned to produce conservation rather than cultivation, and he sees his contribution in the coming years as continuing to experiment with effective storage solutions to enable northern Burkina farmers to increase farm production and earnings.

Lassané is largely self-taught. Born in 1952, his only exposure to formal agricultural education was in 2004 and 2005 when he participated in courses on drip irrigation, seed cultivation, and nursery planting techniques.