Paul is on Vacation this Week, and an Introduction to Three of Paul’s Organizations

Posted by Isaac on Sep 3, 2010 in Design-Revolution, Low Cost Design | 0 comments

Paul Polak is taking a well deserved break this week, but will be back and writing next week.  We wanted to take this opportunity to introduce those of you who are new to the work Paul has done to three of the organizations Paul has founded of co-founded.  IDE, D-REV and most recently Windhorse International are three organizations that test the ideas written about in Paul’s revolutionary book Out of Poverty.

IDE (International Development Enterprises)

IDE’s origins as a formal organization lie in a visit to a Somalian refugee camp in 1982. It was there that founder Paul Polak noticed a critical lack of transport limiting the economic opportunities of refugees who were relying on manual transportation for all commodities. Following the principle “in technology, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” IDE re-engineered the local donkey cart and interested local artisans in manufacturing one with a more efficient center of gravity, using abandoned car parts for affordability. The donkey carts were a success as more than 500 were sold, producing $1 million of net income for cart owners.  … Read More on IDE’s history

D-Rev (Design Revolution) Paul Co-Founded D-Rev in order to be a part of a revolution in how Designers approach the 90% of the world that goes virtually under served by product designers.  D-Rev is helping develop courses and developing ground breaking products that serve $2 dollar a day and less customers.  For more visit the Design Revolutions Web Site…

Windhorse International

Paul founded Windhorse International as a way to prove that there is a vast untapped market that has been virtually ignored.  Seeking to serve this vast market and make multi-national companies take notice of respectable profit margins.   Designs are needed but to realize the vision and dream Paul has carried of a billion people leaving poverty business and quality design needs to reach scale.  Windhorse International is still not being publicized, but is looking to make some important contributions through it’s products and approaches.  Windhorse is in Beta testing for it’s products and seeking funding to reach scale efficiently and effectively.  (For more check out this article in Bloomberg Businesss Week)

Design for the Other 90% and Wild Blueberries

Posted by Isaac on Aug 27, 2010 in Design-Revolution | 2 comments

by Paul Polak

Many people see design as creating new mechanical tools – better widgets for controlling space, flight, or grinding corn.

For me, design is creative problem solving.

Designing new mechanical tools is often a critical first step, but far from sufficient for creative problem solving. On our quest to help poor smallholders improve their livelihoods, we created useful tools such as treadle pumps and low cost drip systems. But they only addressed about 25% of the problem.

To solve the other 75% of the problem, an effective way to put these tools in the hands of millions of last mile customers had to be designed. This is as true of design in the West as it is for developing countries.

A Field of Wild Blueberries

Since I’m now spending a delightful two weeks of vacation on my wild blueberry farm in Nova Scotia, I thought it might be interesting to describe my experience with a design problem in Canada: how to double or triple the yield of wild blueberry farms in Nova Scotia. I have learned that the recipe for accomplishing this requires a dash of new technology, and a very large portion of new agricultural strategy.

I bought a wooded 160 acre farm at Economy, Nova Scotia in 1999. The price was very reasonable, and the coastline of the Bay of Fundy is beautiful. Then I found out that the woods had lots of wild blueberries, and wild blueberries are the most important economic crop in Nova Scotia. After checking with local people, I learned how to convert wild blueberries in the bush to wild blueberries in the field and started the conversion process on sixty acres ten years
ago.

This year, I harvested my first blueberries. We hand-picked 2,260 pounds from an eight acre field, which I hope will increase rapidly to 32 tons or more from the same field a few years from now.

If it happens, this would represent double or triple the expected yield of one to two tons an acre for wild blueberries in Colchester County, Nova Scotia.

How do I expect to get there?

A mature wild blueberry field in Colchester County has more than 1,000 distinctly different species of blueberry plant. Each new blueberry plant multiplies rapidly through underground roots, and eventually forms a three-meter diameter circle of genetically identical plants, much like a clump of aspen. But each circle is different in blueberry yield – the most productive circle in a field might have 20 times as many berries per plant as the least productive.

A group of agriculture researchers at Kent State Agriculture College (http://www.gnb.ca/0171/10/0171100003-e.asp) studied this, and found that if you picked blueberries from the most productive circles in a field and grew blueberry seedlings by planting the seeds, yields on small test plots increased to around 11 tons an acre.

This is not surprising. People have been breeding horses and dairy cattle in the same way for years – it just hadn’t been applied to wild blueberries.

What the researchers recommended was to create fields of blueberries from bare fields by planting only “select clones.” This sounded interesting to me, so I checked it out.

In one of the chapters in my book, Out of Poverty, I described 12 steps for creative problem solving (P 13-24). The first three steps are the most important:

1. Go to where the action is
2. Talk to the people who have the problem, and listen to what they have to say
3. Learn everything there is to learn about the problem’s specific context

So I talked at length to the researchers at Kent State Agriculture College. I talked to the nursery that they hired to grow select clones. And I talked to as many farmers who tried out planting select clones as I could find.

I quickly learned that most of the farmers who tried planting select clones couldn’t make it work for them, for the following reasons:

1. It costs about $6,000 an acre to plant a field with select clones from scratch, and it
takes at least five years, even planted close together, to get the first crop. This is far too
expensive for most farmers in Nova Scotia.

2. Farmers in who planted select clones to help their developing blueberry fields fill in faster lost many of the seedlings to frost heaving, and most of the seedlings that survived frost heaving died within the first year. So, just about all the farmers who planted select clones became discouraged and quit using them.

I decided to call the nursery that was still selling select clone seedlings, and asked them to put me in touch with anyone who was successful using them.

They gave me the contact information for a grower in Prince Edward Island who kept ordering large numbers of select clones every year. So, I called him up and paid him a visit.

How do you get your seedlings to survive? I asked.

“That’s very simple,” he said. “You have to keep a dirty field.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“For the first two years, the seedlings are very sensitive to herbicides used routinely in blueberry fields,” he said.

“So we plant them in a field full of weeds, and apply no herbicides for a couple of years. The weeds also prevent frost heaving.”

So I tried this, and it worked.

But instead of planting a whole field from scratch, I planted double rows of select clones about twenty feet apart in a field in the early stages of filling in.

This allowed us to keep the herbicides away from the rows we planted, and best of all, it cost less than $500 an acre, instead of the $6,000 an acre it would have cost to plant a field of select clones from scratch. My hope was that the select clones will spread and mix with the wild blueberries growing naturally in the field, and with cross pollination increase yields of wild blueberries already growing in the fields.

A Cluster of Wild Blueberries

Even though the first yield this year was only 2,260 pounds, it has more than double what was expected. The blueberries we picked were plumper and heavier than average, and many of the plants were loaded with blueberries. We estimated this was true for about a quarter of the plants in the field.

My hope is that at a cost of about $500 an acre, we will eventually harvest four to five tons an acre instead of the normally expected one to two tons. Will this happen? I don’t know. But if it does, it will be yet one more example of applying two basic principles of successful design for the other 90%.

1. Before you start designing any tools or strategies, first go to where the action is, talk to the people who have the problem and listen to what they have to say, and learn everything there is to learn about the specific context.

2. Transformative affordable technology (like select clones) usually represents the solution to no more than 25% of the problem being addressed. The rest of the solution lies in designing new strategies, and new ways to deliver the technology to the people who need it.

Finally, I hope it demonstrates that design for the other 90% has just as much applicability to design for developed countries as it has for poor customers in developing countries.

The NAWSA MAD SYSTEM (ASWAN DAM Backwards)

Posted by Kathryn on Aug 20, 2010 in Design-Revolution, Low Cost Design | 4 comments

by Paul Polak

Replicating the Functions of the Aswan Dam on Two Acre Farms:

Aswan High Dam

Like all big dams, the High Aswan dam traps monsoon rainwater and stores it in the 550 km long Nasser Lake behind it, and distributes it

by canal to farmers’ fields during dry season, when irrigation water is desperately needed to grow crops. But can we do the same thing on-farm for the 450 million farms in the world that are smaller than five acres? This would make a game-changing contribution to ending extreme poverty and food insecurity at the same time.

The remarkable thing is that this is entirely feasible. It takes two things:
1. The design and mass dissemination of new radically affordable small enclosed water storage technology, which is already well under way
2. The design of small plot low cost drip irrigation systems to deliver the stored water to farmers’ fields. Through the work of IDE, 500,000 small farmers in Asia and Africa have already purchased the low cost drip system

Most rural villages in developing countries already know how to collect monsoon rainwater. The trick is to store it in such a way that it doesn’t evaporate during the six month wait till the dry season, when crop prices are the highest and water is most precious. The source can be monsoon rainwater from a roof, or collecting runoff at the lowest point on a small farm. They key missing link is affordable enclosed water storage.

1. Affordable enclosed water storage

A Giant Plastic Condom in an Earthen Trench The first thing we tried as simple way to store water was a ten meter long one meter diameter plastic sausage, supported by an earthen trench. This stored just under 10,000 liters, enough to provide all the drinking water a family needs and have enough left over to drip irrigate a small kitchen garden. But we had problems with leakage.

10,000 L Giant Plastic Condom Supported by Trench

The 5,000 L $75 Durable Plastic Bladder Five years later, after a lot of field trials, Jack Keller and J.N. Rai at IDE India have come up with a sturdy thicker walled plastic bladder that stores 5,000 liters of water, it doesn’t leak, and costs about $75. This is just beginning to be marketed, and I think it will make a big impact.

The 200,000 L $500 Plastic Lined Pond with a Plastic Cover This is probably the most important missing link for millions of future NAWSA MAD systems. It takes about 200,000 liters to drip irrigate a quarter acre of off-season fruits, vegetables and spices for 90 days in the dry season, which is capable of bringing in $1,000 in new net income in the dry season. All it would take is a common plastic lined pond ten meters long, ten meters wide, and two meters deep. Now add a 11 meter by 11 meter plastic sheet stretched over bamboo poles to cover the pond, and pile dirt on the overhanging edges of the plastic sheet, and you have a $500 enclosed plastic 200 cu M storage tank, which needs an additional investment of about $200 in a treadle pump, a quarter acre low cost drip system, seeds and fertilizer, and you have new income of $1,000 in the first year. This would be enough to pay back all the capital costs, earn $300 in new net income, and earn $1,000 a year in new income from then on.

2. Low Cost Small Plot Drip Irrigation Systems

Over the last ten years, IDE and its partners have developed a variety of affordable drip irrigation systems for small plots, starting with a $3 kitchen garden kit irrigating 20 square meters, all the way to a one acre drip system costing in the range of $400. Since they generate returns of 200 percent or more on their purchase price, smallholders can buy at whatever size they can afford and expand their system each year with part of the profits they make. Low cost drip systems, combined with affordable enclosed water storage, form the backbone of micro Aswan dam water storage and distribution systems for small farms.

If you want to see what such a low cost micro version of the Aswan Dam looks like on a small farm in India, take a look at this video. I made it in India six years ago, but the main idea still applies.