1998 - Baku, Azerbaijan      1998 - Republic of Belarus

Azerbaijan

I stayed in the capital city of Baku and traveled the 25 kilometer (about 16 miles) to a small village name Zabra, population 3,000 and is near the oil fields on the outskirts of Baku. This was formerly a significant agricultural area, supplying Baku with fruits and vegetables. The state owned greenhouses still dot the area though many are in disrepair due to the lack of money for repair and heat. Azerbaijan is about the same latitude as Virginia/N.Carolina.

Agricultural privatization in this newly independent state, formerly part of the Soviet Union, is moving along slowly. The soil is extremely lacking in nutrients and the land and water are heavily polluted. So I looked to the brighter side of things and thought that if there has ever been a country that is really in need for developing vermicomposting for the use of soil improvement then this is surely the place to teach the techniques of vermicomposting and the marketing of their labors.

I arrived in Baku on January 16th. at 11:30pm after being enroute for 36 hours and their was no one there at the airport to meet me and help me through customs. The International Agricultural Organization that contracted me forgot to give the Baku office my new arrival date. I don't speak Azuri or Russian but did communicate with a local to help me with my luggage and 40 lbs. of worms. He got me through customs so quickly that a missed one of the check stations and had to go back because I saw they were issuing all the foreigners a pink slip of paper with something stamped on it. Anyway when we got on the other side of customs the guy helping me wanted me to pay him twice the amount we had agreed on and I refused, so he took off with my worms. So now here I am in the airport lobby of a strange country with 40 taxi drivers that want to take 10 people to their destinations. By this time I have it figured out (all by myself) that I am not going to get any help. I notice a phone on the wall, but I knew I couldn't get all my luggage over there at one time and didn't want anything else stolen. Now I have this taxi driver that has been bugging me to drive me to a hotel. He speaks broken English so I told him those two boxes that were "taken" from me had worms in them and were no good to the person that "took" them and if he got them back for me I would hire him to drive me to the hotel. He said something to the kid next to him and in 2 minutes this guy that I paid $2.00 to help me returned and threw the boxes at my feet. Maybe I would not have had this problem with the worms if I had given him the $5.00 that he wanted after we cleared customs. Well I had lots of help getting to the taxi which happened to be a private vehicle. It was about a 20 minute ride from the airport to the Hotel Azerbaijan which was prearranged if there was a mix-up at the airport. They (the driver and my helper) carried everything but my money and passport to the hotel entrance and they seemed very nervous - don't know why except that there was local police standing there. My helper wanted an extra US$5.00 because he spoke good English and again I refused because we had agreed on the US$20.00 earlier. He got very angry, but did leave without saying anymore. I figured if I spent US45.00 night for a hotel room the taxi driver was making out with the twenty bucks which is the average monthly income per capita in this country.

The first two nights I spent in the hotel, phones were out and so was the hot water. I was on the eighth floor and had a great view of the harbor and the Caspian Sea. Then I moved to an apartment which was a ten minute walk to the office of my host. They provided me with a driver and an interpreter. I did most of my work out on the mushroom farm and but I couldn't not get away from the paperwork and therefore had to spent three days in the office in meetings and working out the business plan. The scope of the operation was mainly to:

It was either raining, rain mixed with snow or overcast for my entire stay. So I really didn't do much site seeing other than going to a local farm that was requesting assistance to set up his dairy. He has everything but the cows because he ran out of money after building the barns, pasteurizing plant, and workshop. Another interesting stop on the way to the farm was to assist a sausage factory owner to find money to expand their operation (export) and for updating their old processing and cooking machines. I found it much cleaner than that of similar factories that I have seen in other 3rd world countries. Most of my night life was spent going over my dictaphone tapes of our conversations and writing out instructions for setting up the worm farm and the intensive breeding program. This program will turn the 35,000 worms I brought to over 3 million worms in the next 10 to 12 months. (just like rabbits)

The 4th day I feel that my host really accepted me and respected me for the knowledge that I have in this industry. It was this day that they fixed a great lunch and brought it to the farm which they reheated and served on a very primitive table. The other three days I had no idea of what I was eating and I didn't ask. They also had many nice things to say when they toasted me with vodka. The interpreter told them that I was not a drinker and they graciously accepted that, then I toasted them after that uneasy situation had pasted. I toasted them with my hot tea which I never before drank, but there was no coffee and I didn't impose on them for coffee. I was fortunate to work with two former Soviet scientists (Fiak and Eldar) that returned to their homeland when Azerbaijan achieved their independence. I also worked with a professor of Botany (Mr. Ismailov) at the Baku Botanical Institute. The latter had been raising worms in a very small scale which he had purchased from Russia in 1993. From information received off the internet he thought that the worms had to be very wet to breed and therefore most of his worms died from the anaerobic conditions of his beds. Fiak, in his youth was a biologist and math teacher that was recruited by the Soviet Union and received his Phd in St. Petersburg as did Eldar. Fiak worked on developing the use of a salt water algae in the development of the stealth technology for the military war planes to go undetected by radar. Eldar was a physicist turned agronomist that did not talk much about his prior work in the Soviet Union. It was difficult at first because Eldar being very structure and very analytical wanted exact data about vermicomposting. After a few days we both bent a little, my metric conversions were carried out to only one decimal point. The project went quite smoothly from that point on.

They have actually purchased 2.5 hectares of land (1 hectare is about 2.5 acres, oops Eldar corrected me, 1 hectare is equal to 2.451 acres) . The buildings were constructed by the Russians for the production of mushrooms, but never got it up a running. They are just getting started producing the Florida Oyster Mushroom. They got a big laugh when I told them I was from Florida and had come half way around the world to sample this mushroom. I ate some of them that were pickled that was out of this world.

I found that they had acquired a lot of information about worm farming from books and the Internet, also a lot of misinformation, but nobody to turn to for the practical application of what they had learned. I believe this project with be a tough success because each day they took my suggestions of different ways of doing things and made the changes to existing practices just exactly as I had ask them to do. Also what ever I asked them to have ready for the next days activities was always done without fail. But I believe the biggest key to the success that each morning after working for a couple of hours we would break, have hot tea, and talk about thing that were accomplished the day before and any questions that they had were always taken care of before we went on to the next step.

I consider this a successful project and that it will grow into a very large industry for them. Eldar is translating a computer program for me to use in growing different type of mushrooms. You just fill in the type mushroom, then fill in the information of the type compost that you are using and the program will figure the amount, type sterilization, moisture, nitrogen, etc. He said that a complete novice like myself could use this program to commercial raise mushrooms.

I have been in 3rd world countries before so cultural shock was not a problem. It was very interesting to see how well the people could improvise when they have little or nothing to work with. I saw auto mechanic that needed to work under the car, so they got 5 people to tip the car up on one side and place a wheel with inflated tire under the top door jam to keep the vehicle from falling over on it's side. A little dangerous but it worked. The only news I received was in Russian or Azerie which I could not understand. I did see plenty of footage of our President embracing this young woman and the only word I could make out in the 5 minute segment was impeach. Evidently impeach is not in their vocabulary, I wonder why! The only other news that showed about the U.S. was the warships on the Persian Gulf. They had some great TV shows - Adams Family - LA Law - Law and Order - The Simpson's. Most of the movies shown were low budget US films. Sometimes there would be a good but old movie shown. Most of the time they would have only one voice doing all the dubbing of the characters, male, female, & children. At midnight they have MTV European which comes from England and is broadcast in English. I never thought that I would every enjoy MTV. It was broadcasted from midnight to 2a.m. which was my usual bedtime.

My stay was very enjoyable and rewarding. The people that I met and worked with were very sincere, hardworking and eager to learn how to better themselves. I did not see any panhandling on the streets which was quite unusual for overseas struggling economies.

A project like this is a dream - you go into a strange country not knowing what to expect and adapt NOT your system that you know inside and out, BUT a system that will work for them.

Example: Cow manure is always a great feed, not so here because the dairy farms did not have pasture because of the Winter and the only grain they were fed was in the straw which they were using as feed not bedding. It took a couple of precious days trying to understand when this manure was not working. So the feedstock was switched to using the spent mushroom substrate which had more nutrients left than the fresh cow manure.

First we concentrated on building two intense propagation trays. Again not much time to establish the best bedding and feedstock that would promote breeding. Chopped straw was added to bedding mix to keep the bottom of the trays aeriated. The amino-bacter was used daily to keep the surface feed moistening. The temperature of the preparation room was kept between 68 to 72 degrees F. It was observed on the third day that large numbers of worms were breeding and everything we used worked out great. None of these materials (except for the amino-bacter) are what I use here for intense propagation.

Training module of Talking, Doing & Talking, then Written Instructions was used effectively. The following instructions were translated into Russian:

Other items discussed and covered.

It was great working with such well read men that have a vision of what times will be once that new oil pipe line is run to the Black Sea which will generate the amount of money necessary for this country. There main concern was not if they could do it or produce it, but what are they going to do when they can not produce enough castings. They were not concerned with the production of worms because they could see how in 12 months they could produce 6,000 lbs. Of worms per month when they started with 30 lbs of worms. I gave them a reasonable price for shipping castings in bulk containers which would fill all orders that they could not. This seemed to be their biggest concern and it made them feel much better after shook hands on a promise to provide them with quality, UNCUT castings.

They asked me to assist them with a joint venture with a British firm for mushroom production. This firm seemed more interested potential of the castings and worms than they did with the mushrooms. I show them some sketches of my Commercial Automated Vermicomposting System that will be set up on the mushroom farm when they start utilizing commercially generated organic waste and the great worm feed produce by those Methane burning anaerobic digesters. Hopefully in one year I will be able to return and see the fruits of my labors.

It was a great challenge and I feeling fortunate to be able to build a system that they wanted not a system that I had visions of building when I left the U.S. You know the U.S. is really a great place to live!!!

Photo #1: Myself and Eldar. A limestone block building that house the mushroom spores, sterilization unit, and intense redworm propagation. One of the preparation trays that WE built and hammered out. The corners are held in place by pieces of electrical wire placed thru holes that were punched (no drill available) by hand. The wire was then twisted together and worked just as well as the pop rivet.

Photo #2: Eldar, Fiak, and Elchin, my translator (not wearing hat) This is the worm bed where then have been growing the very large European Night Crawler. It is the most beautiful worm that I have ever seen and the only other worm that can compare to this worm is the Canadian Night Crawler.