Contingent Variables and Discerning Farmers: Marginalizing Cattle in Ethiopia's Historically Crop–Livestock Integrated Agriculture (1840–1941)

Abstract

Much like crop production, livestock production has been an integral part of Ethiopia's diverse agro-ecologies for millennia. For a number of farming communities in the Ethiopian region - such as the Zalan, the Arsi, the Boran, and others - cattle keeping has been (and to some still is) not only an economic activity but also a way of life. In the dominantly ensete ( Ensete ventricosum , the 'false banana' plant) cultivating region, located in the southern parts of the country, cattle were important both as a source of food (i ensete foods are preferred with meat or diary products) and manure (to replenish soil fertility in the crop fields). In the central and northern highland region, which is conventionally classified as a cereal complex, the historical evidence suggests that cattle and pasture were integral parts of the agricultural landscape until the close of the nineteenth century. Since the late nineteenth century, however, livestock production seems to have shrunk in space progressively. This change in the magnitude of livestock production has been particularly conspicuous in most of Ethiopia's highland region, where farmers in the past combined crop and livestock agriculture, and in areas such as Arsi, where one-time cattle herders resorted to crop production at a much faster rate only in the twentieth century. The result has been a dramatic decline in highland farmers' per capita livestock possession, with implications ranging from changes in rural families' calorie intake to a severe shortage of plow-oxen.1