Idahoan's old design helped Afghan farms

BOISE — To help poor Afghan villagers make money on potatoes instead of opium poppies, Idaho farmer Pat Rowe borrowed a root cellar design common across his home state's famous potato country in the 1930s and 1940s.

The 68-year-old Rowe, whose family raises tubers and wheat on 2,000 acres near American Falls, went to the country as part of a $6.4 million U.S. Department of Agriculture program meant to fill gaps in Afghanistan's food supply chain and develop agriculture to compete with the forbidden poppies that fuel the country's heroin trade.

As part of his work in Bamiyan, located about 100 miles west of Kabul, Rowe said it was important his potato sheds not be too sophisticated. They had to be built with materials readily available in the impoverished valley between the Hindu Kush and the Koh-i-Baba mountains with only dirt roads, a gravel runway, scant trees and almost no electricity.

Before leaving, he took notes from neighbors on Idaho's Snake River plain who had an old root cellar on their property.

"You look at what people are using and see what they are doing," Rowe said of his trip. "You don't want to be a crazy foreigner with all these ideas. You've got to be practical with the application."

Rowe's work in January 2006 won mention earlier this month by first lady Laura Bush.

She was in France for the International Conference in Support of Afghanistan on June 12 when she brought up Rowe's root cellars in a speech before an audience that included French President Nicolas Sarkozy, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai.

"Afghan potato farmers in Bamiyan have learned storage methods from an Idaho potato farmer that are making their crops more profitable," said Bush, who had made an unannounced trip to Bamiyan four days earlier.

Paul Sippola, the Central and South Asia program officer for private Washington, D.C.,-based nonprofit development outfit CNFA, which ran the Department of Agriculture aid program, said Rowe's retro cellar design was used in about 50 potato storage sheds in Afghanistan.

It's now being replicated with a few modifications to suit local needs in Pakistan's Kashmir region, where seed potato farmers' livelihoods were devastated by the 2005 earthquake, Sippola said.

"It's essentially the same one that Pat developed," he said in a phone interview. "Pat's work, which started in Afghanistan, has really grown. It's fed over into some of our other programs because the success of it has been really pronounced."