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Warren Buffett’s Son May Donante $500M To Support Agriculture In Rwanda

Warren Buffett’s Son May Donante $500M To Support Agriculture In Rwanda

By Tim Gaynor  | From Al Jazeera

Dressed in a padded jacket against the high desert chill of a southern Arizona winter, philanthropist Howard Buffett got fired up about one of his favorite subjects, soil.

“This is a very similar environment to South Africa,” he said of the sandy earth shot through with clay that hardens to rock when it dries out after the annual rainy season. “There’s lots of soils in Africa that have that problem.”

He was on a 1,500-acre test farm on a broad plain between the rugged Chiricahua and Dragoon mountains of southeastern Arizona that is part of a research archipelago on two continents where Buffett’s cash-flush charitable foundation is gambling an ambitious plan to beat global hunger and is poised to sink upward of $500 million on his big idea in Rwanda.

“There are hundreds of soil types in Africa, so you’re never going to be able to say this is, like, the perfect place. But as long as it provides some of the challenges that you would have typically in different places in Africa, that’s what we’re looking for, and we get that here,” he said.

Having built one of the world’s biggest fortunes, through the Berkshire Hathaway investment conglomerate — current market capitalization, $364 billion — investor Warren Buffett gave his eldest son, Howard Buffett, and two other children stock in the firm in 1999 to be used for charitable ends.

Drawing on his experience as a farmer in Nebraska and Illinois, Howard Buffett set himself the goal of bettering the living standards of the world’s poorest through improved food and water security. His Howard G. Buffett Foundation has an endowment worth at least $7 billion, according to current Berkshire stock prices.

Tucked in this remote corner of Arizona — the fields dotted with barns and tractor sheds, water pumps and pivot irrigation systems — Buffet funds research into conservation-based, no-till farming that seeks to create healthier soils and produce high yields from fewer inputs.

The farm experiments with rotations of maize and bean crops, flattening the residue with roller crimpers — giant rolling pins wrapped with raised chevrons. The practice reduces erosion, fixes moisture and organic nutrients in the soil and, over time, lessens the need for nitrogen fertilizers. Runoff laced with fertilizer can create algae blooms, resulting in dead zones in lakes and oceans, such as in the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the Mississippi.

Read more at Al Jazeera