Agriculture
Irob farming is distinguished by its terraced crop lands, known as Daldal. The local farmers build a series of check dams in the seasonal watercourses to trap the silt washed down them, which they gradually raise and lengthen, until after several years a series of step-like terraces are created, which are up to 10 meters high and about 8 meters wide, with about 20 meters between dams. These terraces are then used for farming or grazing. Building daldals is a relatively recent innovation, having been started by two farmers in Awo village in the late 1940s, and advocated by an Irob elder, Zigta Gebre Medhin, starting in the early 1960s.
A sample enumeration performed by the CSA in 2001 interviewed 4,045 farmers in this woreda, who held an average of 0.19 hectares of land. Of the 787 hectares of private land surveyed, 80.56% was in cultivation, 3.94% pasture, 0.89% fallow, 0.51% woodland, and 14.23% was devoted to other uses. For the land under cultivation in this woreda, 53.88% was planted in cereals, 2.03% in pulses, and 0.25% in oilseeds. Fruit trees were planted in 191 hectares. 76.54% of the farmers both raised crops and livestock, while 12.44% only grew crops and 11.03% only raised livestock. Land tenure in this woreda is distributed amongst 95.3% owning their land, 1.65% renting, and 3.18% under other forms of tenure.
Read more about this topic: Irob (woreda)
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