I recently taught a seminar for Otammari people on how to garden with compost. While preparing for the seminar, I learned that composting used to be a part of Otammari culture, but it fell out of practice with the arrival of commercial fertilizers.

One person told me that their ancestors used to dig big holes, fill them with crop residues—corn stalks and husks, sorghum stalks and peanut plants—and let it decompose. When the rains came the following year, they would dig out the compost and spread it on their fields.

Another person told me that when she was a child they would fill storage rooms with dried cow dung (things dry fast here). When the rains came, all the women and children would haul the dung to the fields and spread it while the men plowed it under. They would then plant the fields, and the crops would thrive.

Nowadays, the soil had degraded and become much less fertile because the practice of composting is all but forgotten. So, when I taught the people about composting, I told them it wasn’t new information, but something their ancestors had done for many generations. Now comes the hard part—putting it into practice.

• Twitter