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Working the ground
Vic Claassen builds relationships in Afghanistan while equipping students to reclaim the soil.
by Melanie Zuercher
In Vic Claassen’s estimation, there is almost no soil so badly damaged it can’t be regenerated with intensive effort – even soil in a country ravaged by war for most of the past three decades.
Since 1990, Vic has been an assistant research soil scientist in the Department of Air, Land and Water Resources, University of California at Davis. And starting in May 2009, he began sharing his expertise with professors and students at the University of Kabul, Afghanistan.
Vic grew up in Wichita and in the Hillsboro area – his father, the late Henry W. Claassen ’48, was a teacher who farmed in the summers while his mother, the late Meribeth Nachtigal Claassen ’48, was a teacher and the organist for Lorraine Avenue Mennonite Church, Wichita.
When Vic was ready to go to college in the early 1970s, “environmental studies [as an academic discipline] was just getting started,” he says, “and Dwight Platt [’52, professor emeritus of biology] was really pushing to get an integrated environmental program together at Bethel, not just as part of the biology major. That was a [significant] innovation at the time, and Bethel was small and quick enough to get an environmental studies major established and to pull it off.”
Vic graduated from Bethel in 1975 with a B.S. in environmental studies with teaching certification. He taught high school biology and zoology for a decade and then went to Wichita State University for a master’s degree in biology, before going on to UC-Davis. There, he earned another master’s degree – as well as, in 1992, a Ph.D. – in soil science.
Vic describes his work as “like a hospital emergency room – we provide quick help to a non-functioning substrate, to get it stabilized and stop the damage, and to restart the soil processes.
“We evaluate drastically damaged soil – at mining sites, ski areas, road edges, old building sites. Anything that doesn’t grow plants will start to erode. On wild lands, un-vegetated soils begin to compact and then lose nutrients, so the ground stays un-vegetated and erosive. It’s an annoying chronic problem but it can be fixed.”
As a research soil scientist, Vic has to get his own funding by “generating projects, delivering them and then using the lessons learned to get other projects.” So far, he’s been successful and, until recently, also content to “stay at home while everybody else did the traveling.”
Then he had a student, Matt Curtis, who took his training in working with damaged soil to Afghanistan and Tajikistan as a missionary. In the process of serving as a resource for Matt, Vic became involved in the A-4 program – Advancing Afghan Agricultural Alliance, which Purdue University established under a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
From 1979-89, Afghanistan was ripped apart by the conflict between the Marxist Afghan government, backed by the Soviet Union, and the Islamist Mujahideen. Then after 9/1l, there was the war with the United States and its NATO allies against the Taliban, which still continues, though at a lower level than previously.
“After the war, the universities were gutted and the professors dispersed,” Vic says. “Academic settings currently tend to be paper- and lecture-oriented, based on a memorization style of instruction. [Through A-4] we’re trying to go back and generate field and lab activities in the agriculture faculties, and reconstitute the normal four-year course process. Hands-on experiences and critical thinking activities also need improvement.
“There are four major functioning universities in the country,” he continues, “and a number of others that have no lab facilities at all. We’ve been going to the agriculture departments [at the Universities of Kabul and Herat] to meet with the professors and find out what the course loadings are like and how we can help establish the labs.” Since May 2009, Vic has been to Kabul three times, most recently this past June.
One of the basics of establishing a soil research lab experience, Vic says, is digging a soil pit and analyzing the horizons. A soil pit is generally three feet square and three feet deep, or however deep crop roots normally go. The A horizon (topsoil) and B horizon (subsoil) make different soils distinctive from each other, from lowlands to upland areas. Describing soil horizons and taking samples are vital to understanding how water will react with the soil – drain away, leaving crops thirsty; pool and drown the roots – and how to deal with that successfully. Some of the specifics Vic is working on are how to maintain soil fertility and how to reduce “crusting” on irrigated soils.
About 80 percent of Afghans rely on agriculture – mostly subsistence agriculture. In addition to disrupting the universities, the war made thousands of Afghans into internal refugees, creating agricultural problems of food production and distribution.
“Afghans may have a good intuitive idea about soil management in their own situation,” Vic says, “but it is not easily transferred or applied to soils from different areas and to other soil conditions, when they have to move, or manage agriculture for the whole country.”
Although Vic’s most recent trip to Kabul was to wind up the project begun in 2009, he doesn’t see the work in Afghanistan as anywhere near done. “There is internet access, so I would like to get some kind of distance learning going,” he says, “[and] put more effort into working with smaller growers.
“If I can help two or three people at each university plus some of these small farmers get to know each other, they can form a virtual community for talking to each other,” he says.
“It hit me how multidisciplinary these trips were,” Vic adds. “It’s like heading off to a different class every day, similar to my experience at a small, liberal arts college.
“A liberal arts education exposes you to everything. It’s not enough to be a specialist in just one area – it’s math and statistics, and music and the arts, and history. A multidisciplinary education expects competence in many different areas and calls for personal responsibility and accountability.
“There are 36,000 people at my university,” he notes. “People become so specialized, it’s inevitable that they are unaware of and leave out elements of a project. In my trips to Afghanistan, I’ve had to be ready for lots of simultaneous challenges and to have the ability to sort out priorities of time and resources. It’s important to offer to take care of a problem but it’s also important to take time to stop and drink the tea and listen to the locals. You need to understand what’s important to other people, to make the personal link.
“At Bethel, there are people who have figuratively worked a plot of ground for a long time – a ‘small tribal atmosphere.’ Personal interactions are very important. You can’t just disappear into the crowd.”
[Author’s note: Among the similarities between his Bethel education and experience and what he has encountered in Afghanistan, Vic also lists “long family tradition.” When Vic’s son Ben attended Bethel from 2007-09, before returning to California to study economics, he represented the fourth generation of Claassens at Bethel.]