Samuel Benoit

Before I left Canada, my stock answer to the question was that I was going to be contributing to research pertaining to water quality and agricultural sustainability, but further questions would force me to admit that I didn’t know much more beyond that statement. Well, it turns out I had no idea how little I knew about what I was going to be doing.

For the past month I have been helping to collect data on livestock, food consumption, income and energy use for a study on biofuel use in rural areas of Northern Karnataka. As an ecologist, I do like to try to see the interconnections between all things, but I can admit that this has little to do with what I said I was going to do. This is part of the Master’s thesis of Queen’s student Peter Ralevic, who is here for two months to collect his data. We do this through an epic survey delivered to farmers in the Kannada language through the assistance of students the University of Agricultural Sciences. All the data will be put into a mathematical program that holds values for each rupee, plant and ton of manure that should be able to make recommendations on how farmers can better integrate their activities to be able to fulfill their energy requirements from their own farm.

We generally take a jeep out in the morning to one of the two study villages, Shivalli, and the one I am deciding to spell Inamungal, interview farmers until they have all gone to the fields by about 1pm, then we go back to Dharwad and feast. As of today, we have reached our sample goals for both the villages. There remains now a third village that is further away so we will probably have to stay at for a week to collect.

On my flicker site there some new photos of our team working in village offices, fields, homes and temples. In the coming days I will be posting some of the best photos that I had the chance to take in Shivalli and the village currently spelled as Inamungal.