Friday, May 5, 1989 / University Daily Kansan
CROP chief sees need for organic farming
Cultivation methods need attention, he says
by Merceda Ares Kansan staff writer
Kansan staff writer
Daniel Nagengast described a common occurrence from his past.
"You'll be walking along out in the middle of nowhere," Nengasag said, "and you'll turn and come around a bush. And there will be a guy on a white Arabian stallion with its tail dved red with hema.
Africa was the world Nagengast was in.
"The guy has on yellow boots up to his knees, carrying a sword with a spear in his hand, and the horse is lying on the bank. What world are I in right pow?"
He was a Peace Corps volunteer and later consultant in West Africa from 1977 to 1985.
Nagenagst is director of Church World Service/CROP for Kaucas in Topeka, which canvasses money and wheat for countries overseas.
At age 37. Nagengast seems to have found the answer to life: making an impact.
"The ideal is that you find something that helps you live but also makes a statement in the world, makes a change," he said. "I've had a great life, and I've never been wealthy."
"There's nothing more foreign to me than somebody saying, 'It looks like we're going to need microprocessor technicians in the 1990s. So I'm going to be a microprocessor so that I can make money to buy a BMW."
"That whole idea of just doing anything so you can get your material goodies. That's a waste of life. What are you going to do — put on your tombstone, 'I owned seven RBMWs' that find a hollow dream."
Nagengast's own dream, organic farming, is a small one, he said.
"I think the smaller statement is probably the best," he said. "The Gandhi of this world are just too big for me to comprehend. I'm more confident that people to reconsider how they grow food and where they buy food."
"I don't know if it is the solution, but my intellect tells me it is part of the solution," he said. "All those things start messing together, and it
No chemically based pesticides, fertilizers or herbicides are used in organic farming.
1.
I'm more interested in teaching people to reconsider how they grow food and where they buy food.'
Dan Nagengast
makes a statement."
Connie Tilton, program assistant for CROP, said Nagenagast was always on the move setting up CROP and canvassing money and wheat.
"I suppose more than the rest of us, he realizes what poverty is," she said.
Nagengast became interested in the Peace Corps after graduating in 1976 from Columbia University in New York City with a law degree. He went on to Lafayette and Population Program at Tulane University in Medford, Mass., near Boston.
"It seems like I'm always involved in underdog issues, and sometimes underdogs aren't the most wonderful team," he said. "They're their side no matter what." he said.
"I went to law school and did a lot of public defender stuff. Some of your work was with the police some reason, I always thought, 'Well somebody's got to be on that side.'"
"For the year 1976, I tried to find out every law in the world that would affect population. That really got me interested in things overseas, and obviously, I wasn't going to get there until it became a future, so I joined the Pope Corps."
In 1977, he taught small farmers in Sierra Leone, in West Africa, to grow paddy rice in swamps instead of forests.
Cobras were not the only danger. One day, he discovered diamond diggers in the swampland he and the two men were working on for a year and a half.
"The swamps are a lot more work because it's a more permanent type of agriculture," he said. "It's just incredible work chopping down trees, taking the stumps out, sometimes in your waist; and there are cobras."
That was the day he almost got kicked out of Sierra Leone.
He said that Sierra Leone had
many diamonds that washed down out of the mountains and were found at the bottom of the swamps.
"I went out to the swamp and there was a bunch of guys digging for diamonds," he said. "I didn't go crazy, but I笑了. What are you guys doing here?" You know, you could just see this coming.
"I went back to town and talked to the farmers. Well, it turned out that there was a group called the Internal Security, and they were digging diamonds at the request of the administrators in the region and the chief, who was also telling me, 'Yeah, we want agriculture.'
"There's this conflict between the chief and the villagers. I tried to organize the villagers just to make a sea to the chief no to dig diamonds, and they just kind of perceived it as, are you guys to tell me what to do?"
"I thought, 'I'm just a Peace Corps volunteer; I'm leaving.' I left town or about a month. But I came back. They didn't find any diamonds, which solved the problem, so the 'armers still had their swamp.'
In 1980, Nagengast moved on to Mali in West Africa to train extension agents to help farmers grow wheat.
"The Malian school system was cranking out tons of people, and the only place to absorb them is the government, so you get this civil service that just grows and grows and grows." Nangagend said. "There's all these educated people, and there's no outlet for them. I was training extension agents in Mali who had never grown wheat before."
Nagengast compared the project to the work of dung beetles, which are common in Africa. They collect insects from grass and roll it back to their nest for food.
"One day, I saw two of them pushing one ball, sort of helping each other, and I thought, 'Gee, cooperation, this is great,'" he said. "I started thinking about it, and it was sort of a metaphor for that project."
Another frustration that Nagen-gast had in Mali was the lack of decent food.
"Somebody sent me four bananas on a boat," he said. "When they got there, they were black, shrived things. That was the only fruit I had
Daniel Nagengast
in a long time. The only thing you can get there is cigarettes. Cigarettes and Nescafe.
"They're real tea drinkers. They drink tea two or three days a day. It takes about two hours to drink it with tons and tons of sugar. The way you mix it is you pour it from a height into these tiny glasses and then you pour it back in. People take pride in how well they make tea."
Nagengast said that pride was a fundamental part of the African people.
"You can be making $100,000 a year and still feel sorry for your family," he said. "The Africans don't see money but rarely and have more people around them. They are large, are poor, and life's OK. That's really a wonderful lesson to learn."
Nagengast learned many lessons in Africa that he brought back with him.
"A lot of things just don't interest me," he said. "Maybe the culture shock has to do with realizing how unimportant a lot of things are."
"I remember going to a super market, and I saw two young women maybe in their 20%, and they were in line in front of me and they were having a conversation. They'd been in high school together, and this was the first time they'd seen each other. But while they were talking for a minute they were talking about some guy in a soap opera who was marrying someone else.
"Yeah, nothing had happened in their lives. That's the culture shock art of it — the people who don't live there," he said to other people's lives on television.
Nagengast and his wife, Lynn Byczynski. have no television.
"One of the reasons I don't have television is because I'd be watching it all the time," he said. "I mean, it's not like I'm superior to television. I realize if I had one, I'd be wasting my time watching it all the time. If you're an alcoholic, you try not to keep alcohol."
Instead of watching television, Nagengast and his wife spend their
time growing organic fruits, vegetables and flowers on a farm they are restoring outside of Auburn, Kan.
"We're complementary," Nagen-gast said. "She does the horticulture, and I do the agriculture."
Byczynski said that she, like Nagengast, always had been interested in planting and growing.
"It made it pretty apparent that we should be together," she said.
They were married on a rainy, summer day in 1967 in a grass field beside one of their planting fields.
Now, Nagengast and Byczynski are preparing to be parents.
"We're about three months away." Nagengast said of his wife's pregnancy.
For Nagengast, the time is right.
For Nagenast, the time is right.
"When you're young, you tend to think you know it all," he said. "The older you get, you realize how little you know about important things. There's a ripening that takes place in everybody's life. Family and things like that start to make more sense."
more HIT SAVINGS AT KIEF'S The Big Sale Week Continues. The Sale Sounds of Rap and Soul...
TONE LOC KID 'N PLAY STEVIE B
Lp/Cass. CD
only only
$5^95 $10^89
$5^95 $11^94
$5^95 $11^94
CAPITOL HITS...
SHOP WITH THE BEST.
Lp/Cass. CD
only only
Great White $6^{49}$ $11^{88}
Bonnie Raitt $6^{88}$ $11^{88}