They took consultancy from a guy who was specialist of conventional agricultural. Alan who is consultant, transformed the desert into the new habitat. After 2 years Alan passed away, they did not have any support afterwards. Indeed they were really hard to solve their problems by using traditional ways, but they never gave up. At the beginning of journey, they could not follow Alan’s steps properly. The couple had to shoot one of the jackal which had eaten their lots of chickens because they could not find the way to prevent jackal eating their chickens. Later on they realized that one of their dogs protect their chickens from the wild animals and then became the guard of the chickens. Many problems happened like this. They felt that problems were in the line to break out.
For instance; the snails covered the fruit trees and the number of snails increased rapidly. They could not catch them from trees, but surprisingly they realized that the favorite duck food is the snail. That is why, they moved the ducks among the fruit trees. In a short period ducks had eaten more than 15.000 snails and they managed to get rid of all snails. After solving this problem, fruits became more tasty and smelled more beautiful. When they had more beautiful fruits, the fruits attracted more birds which like to eat them. Two in third of fruits were wasted as chickens’ food. They placed the owl nests to the top of trees and house’s roofs. At the end of documentary they declaimed more than 80 owls have lived all around the farm. The problems they faced, seems gone.
As I know some examples in Turkey, I will share with you.
The farmers have agricultural spraying on the fruits in order to prevent birds eating the fruits. Indeed this spraying detracts all creatures from all frogs which eat fly to birds from fruits. Later on the fly larvas are seen in the fruits. They have more agricultural spraying in order to get rid of these fly larvas. That is why the list dejectedly goes on.
I am sure that making agricultural by using conventional ways is tough, but it is a fact that the traditional ways, which were learnt from our ancestors, are forgotten.