066 – Polly Noyce: Manor House

[00:00:00] David: Hello and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I’m David Stern, a founding director, and I’m here today with Polly Noyce, a collaborator who’s been working with us in, I suppose our collaboration has been around Manor House in Kenya.

Hi, Polly.

[00:00:23] Polly: Hi there, David. Yes, indeed. That’s how we met. We met through Beth down in Kisumu, a lovely dinner.

[00:00:31] David: Absolutely. I should clarify Beth Medvecky is a collaborator who I’ve been working with now over 10 years. I will soon manage to get her on a podcast episode as well. And she’s been working on basically elements of the Collaborative Crops Research Program which has now become the Global Collaborations for Resilient Food Systems where we’ve been working together on research in agroecology for if you want, farmer led research, farmer research networks as it’s called.

Anyway, that’s a whole different story, a whole different episode, but that is indeed how we met. And she introduced me to Manor House, where she has a long history, but not quite as long as yours.

[00:01:15] Polly: No, that’s true. I started, it was in 1981 in August, in Nairobi, when I met the first few people who really pinned me down and got me interested in Manor House as a place to teach about sustainable agriculture to the smallholder farmers. And there are plenty of people in Kenya with very small pieces of land.

[00:01:39] David: Absolutely. You’re talking now about a 40 year history of the institution. Is that right?

[00:01:46] Polly: That’s right. So coming up in July, we will be 40 years old at Manor House. We started in 1984.

[00:01:53] David: Amazing.

[00:01:55] Polly: At the current site. So that old school. It’s where we started and it’s where we still are.

[00:02:01] David: Absolutely. And I’ve had the privilege of visiting a few times and one of the things which, I should say it’s more than a few times now…

[00:02:09] Polly: Visiting and staying!

[00:02:11] David: Visiting and staying and being involved in workshops there, and in pieces of research. My area is research methods. But more than that, we’ve also had, you’ve had maths camps there.

[00:02:22] Polly: That was so much fun!

[00:02:24] David: They were. We’ve done our 21st century skills courses with students at Manor House. It’s just an incredible, very simple in many ways, but incredible space which is for training in a rural setting and, as you say, designed to support smallholder owners.

[00:02:43] Polly: Yeah. But also the work that you and Beth are doing has expanded our reach so much more than what it was before. We were very insular. We were very narrow in looking just at farmers growing food for the family.

And Beth has expanded it, of course, to empower farmers to figure out for themselves what really works to solve their problems. And then of course you, without your help, to figure out the statistics of the results, she wouldn’t be having results. So thank you for that.

[00:03:19] David: Well…

[00:03:19] Polly: That’s an overstatement. I’ll scratch that. I’ll scratch that.

[00:03:24] David: No. Beth would always find ways to get the sort of rigour behind her results. I’ve just been one of the many people who have supported her and believed in the work that she does. But I want to come back to the origins of Manor House before, because I’ve only really known it, I would argue, maybe from what I’ve heard, when it went through a little blip past its heyday.

In its heyday, and I’ve heard of people who have gone through, it was transformative. In any 40 year history of an organisation, there will be ups and downs. And when I got involved, it wasn’t at its highest.

[00:03:58] Polly: Yeah.

[00:03:58] David: But I’ve heard about some of the earlier stories. Can you tell me a bit more about that?

[00:04:03] Polly: Yeah, I think that what happened to us, more than anything else, is that we didn’t know how to earn money, or to win money through grant proposals, and so those of our best staff who moved through, and of course, in an educational environment, it’s the teachers who make the difference.

[00:04:26] David: Yeah.

[00:04:26] Polly: So some of our best people moved on in their lives and we didn’t have enough money to hold onto them. They proceeded on with their education, they got a higher status and they got a better job elsewhere and we couldn’t keep them.

[00:04:41] David: I understand that part, but take me back to the heyday, because I’ve heard some of the stories there.

[00:04:47] Polly: So in the beginning in the very, very beginning, I had just graduated, or not quite, I’d finished my coursework at UC Santa Cruz, and I was in the environmental studies department, following the track of appropriate technology sustainable agriculture. Sustainable agriculture being my appropriate technology, right?

And so when I went to Manor House, I was still a young woman in my 20s, but I wanted to share what I had learned from all my bookkeeping and the little bit of practical work we did in the gardens there and the farm at UC Santa Cruz. So I had the help of very few people. One was Albert Aboli and he had been studying down in South America at the… I can’t remember the name of it, the Peace University or something along those lines, and also doing gardening there and teaching farmers how to grow food sustainably using organic methods. So he was very key and he was with us for a number of years also teaching.

And then we had Francis Motturi, who had been with the original team, hand picked by John Jevons of Ecology Action, John Jevons of How to Grow More Vegetables biointensive master for us, who studied under Alan Chadwick at UC Santa Cruz. Alan Chadwick’s garden is there at UC Santa Cruz. So it all tied together in that way.

And our team, our hand picked team all quit, the four of them all quit the same day that we finally signed the purchase agreement for the 40 acres that include most of the buildings that were Manor House Preparatory School. So now we have the property, we’re ready to begin, but we have no staff. Nobody.

We don’t have a director, a nutritionist, or the two trainers. So I stepped in because what else do you do? And I didn’t want to give up on the dream. And a lot of people encouraged me and Polly, just give it up, just come home. You’ve tried, but just, yeah, accept defeat. And I wouldn’t do that.

So we continued and it was with that sort of passion that I felt, and the few people who are also passionate with me, that we were able to get started. And we got a couple of trainers to come over from UC Santa Cruz, people that had been through the same program I was in and they helped a lot. They didn’t know the language right away. But in terms of doing it practically and showing people what to do, they were really great.

[00:07:28] David: Let me just come in on this because you’re talking about, as you say, the mid 80s here, the real efforts to get these sorts of farm gardens in different ways to get these ideas out more scalably. But the idea then was always about getting this as a training institution. And I’ve heard of a range of people who keep coming up, who went through Manor House in those early years, in the sort of 80s and 90s, and how transformative this was at that point, because this sort of training, practical training, wasn’t widely available at that point.

[00:08:04] Polly: Yeah that’s very true. And even in getting started, I didn’t know how to get started. I didn’t know the local vegetables. I was entirely reliant on the peasant farmers around. And to start our first garden, I got the help of people who actually had been left behind by the British. They’d been working, or their parents, had been working for the British and they just got left behind and left with their plots down by the river. They were the first students I had, and they taught me as much as I taught them.

[00:08:39] David: And this has been part of what I’ve always heard of the Manor House approach, that it has always been very collaborative. It’s been very much, as you say, focused on smallholders, people who were being left behind by the current systems, by the big farming, which was taking off in Kitale, the Kitale area at that time, because it was one of the breadbaskets, of course, of the country.

[00:08:59] Polly: Yes.

[00:08:59] David: But there were these smallholder farmers.

[00:09:02] Polly: People had been pushed to the edges, and they were eeking out a living as best they could. And everything that they would hear would be from the big agrochemical companies and the big seed companies saying, plant this, plant it with this fertilizer, top dress it with that and spray it with this. And it was like, that’s all they’re hearing. Let’s show them that what their grandparents taught them still works and we can improve on it. With a little more knowledge, we can make it even better.

[00:09:31] David: This is the thing, at that time where there was such a push towards the industrial agriculture as you framed it, having this sort of alternative which small holders were really needing and needing to access because they couldn’t afford the inputs in the different ways.

They didn’t have the land sizes to make it make sense in the same way their big neighbours who had large holdings were able to use these sorts of methods for better or for worse.

[00:09:59] Polly: Right.

[00:10:00] David: But there was this real need, and Manor House filled that gap. It’s not the only one, but I was amazed when I was working at Maseno University and I said, I’m going to Manor House. And the professors there knew about it. This didn’t just have, this didn’t just have little local impact, this was a known institution. And its history is known.

[00:10:22] Polly: Yeah, we were fortunate that when we stepped in, we were pretty much the only people teaching organic, sustainable agriculture. The others came up under us. And then, for a while, our biggest problem was when we felt like we needed to get bigger because all these little guys became universities teaching sustainable agriculture and now we’re getting left behind.

[00:10:49] David: Yeah.

[00:10:49] Polly: And I don’t think I was able to convince the other trustees that actually what we do really well and we do it practically and no, we’re not going to be a university, we don’t have people of that, at that time upper education. We can’t afford to hire them in the first place. So what we do is we teach people on the ground by doing something that they can understand when doing it with their own hands and their own eyes, and then eating the result. It’s very reaffirming to eat this new crop, this new food that you’ve never had before and you were able to grow it yourself.

[00:11:27] David: And this was, this is, as you say, that story of how the institutions overtook Manor House in many ways in this sort of growth that Kenya has experienced over the last 40 years, which has been fantastic in many ways. The educational institutions which have come up and which have come into prominence.

Many of these sorts of sustainable agricultural institutions have had in their history, relationships with Manor House in different ways. And one of the things that I think when we came in, and when I started getting involved through Beth, with Manor House, there was this sense that as you say, Manor House had been a little bit left behind because it hadn’t followed the standard processes that the other institutions had. It had tried to keep to its roots.

[00:12:16] Polly: Yeah.

[00:12:16] David: And that had been challenging.

[00:12:18] Polly: Yeah.

[00:12:18] David: But that’s also now coming around in another way because what’s so exciting with the, as you described from Beth’s work, this sort of farmer research network approach, is that this is, again, it’s about putting things in the hand of smallholder farmers in a way which is more scalable, in a way where the technology is coming in and enabling us to do things that we couldn’t have done or you couldn’t have done in the 80s in the same way. And I suppose, your family history, of course, is very technology focused.

[00:12:48] Polly: That’s true.

[00:12:50] David: So this is something where, from my perspective coming in, I’ve always been very encouraged by how welcoming Manor House has been to having the maths camps, us doing things related to these 21st century skills, trying to bring in that technology training into these rural communities as well.

[00:13:10] Polly: Yeah, for sure. I mean, it makes so much difference to the youth. And I look at the youth in Kenya and I just, I scratch my head, what will be happening in the years to come? Because the Kenyan population is so overbalanced in youth, there’s so many young people compared to the number of older people. And the older people are hanging on tight to their jobs. So it’s the new technologies, it’s the new abilities that the youth are looking for. And even there, it’s going to be a very tight playing field. There won’t be space for many. Unless they can self employ.

And self employment, okay, self employment, but on what resources? And the major resource in Kenya is land. That’s still a major resource that’s so important to so many people, to hold on to that little piece of land.

[00:14:04] David: And one of the things there, which I think is so important, which we’ve often delved into in different ways is the importance of these small holder communities and these rural communities and actually creating opportunities for them to be successful and vibrant rather than, in many of these communities, the youth are feeling the need to go to urban centres.

[00:14:25] Polly: Yeah, as all over the world.

[00:14:27] David: But this is part of where some of these interesting intersections have come together. And we don’t claim to have the solutions on this because we’ve had these little experiments, and I love the 21st century skills which was run then at Manor House.

[00:14:41] Polly: It certainly helped a couple people I know get into a really good college, so thanks.

[00:14:47] David: And this is the thing that those efforts to bring those ideas into rural communities, COVID cut short some of those initiatives.

[00:14:54] Polly: Yes.

[00:14:55] David: But they’ve not gone away.

[00:14:56] Polly: No.

[00:14:56] David: And what I was really excited about with Manor House and the way it’s evolving now and the history it’s had is that it’s gone through tough times, but it’s come out the other way with renewed energy.

[00:15:08] Polly: Yeah.

[00:15:08] David: And I’ve not been there for the last year, but I felt that things are really rebuilding and it’s hard work.

[00:15:15] Polly: But also the time is right. We’ve been in the field, we’re recognized, people, give us some credit for the changes that have come. And we feel very well positioned to be instrumental in being the training facility of choice for all the environmental efforts that are going on right now. I haven’t told you everything.

[00:15:41] David: No.

[00:15:42] Polly: But the World Bank money has come down to the ward level and we’re in there. We’re making ourselves known and the Ward Climate Change Committee is very happy that we exist because they’ve been looking for a project that they can support for funding.

[00:15:57] David: Well, this is where I think, just very simply on this, that this long history which you’ve been so intertwined in and it’s been very personal for you in really constructive ways, this has become something which means so much to you, as I’ve known from some of our discussions.

[00:16:16] Polly: You want to use the word, it’s my legacy.

[00:16:20] David: I was going to say, it’s been your passion for many years to see the institution grow, take different forms, evolve as it has.

[00:16:28] Polly: Yeah. And it still comes down to leave the world a little better than where you found it, at least in some ways that you are able to influence. And I still try to do that. I try to be a better person. I try to be more, more considerate of the needs of others because that’s a really big thing for somebody who like me was able to go to Kenya and start a project because I had family money, that’s not the typical person volunteering in Kenya, these are the Peace Corps, the people from Britain, they’re not in that position.

[00:17:01] David: No.

[00:17:01] Polly: I was in a very privileged position and I have to remind myself all the time that I’m there for a purpose and it’s not just to make myself happy. Though helping other people does make me happy. I’m never sure if what I’m doing is helping or interfering. So I’d like to leave that job to others to figure that part out. Just encourage them.

[00:17:24] David: What I find so refreshing, and as I say, I only got involved more recently when Manor House was going through sort of tougher times.

[00:17:33] Polly: Yes.

[00:17:34] David: What I’ve always had so much admiration for, exactly how you have tried to step back, I’m sure at some point I’ll get the opportunity to interview David Mwangi, who is the current director of Manor House. And the way you’ve really encouraged him to grow into that role and give him that responsibility and that ability to take on the responsibility and to build something, which isn’t your vision, but it’s building from the vision you originally had. You’ve had such a history, but that way you’ve managed to keep that relationship and yet step back and allow it to grow into something new.

[00:18:17] Polly: And I’ve had my hard years also when I just was too far away.

[00:18:22] David: Yeah.

[00:18:22] Polly: And things were changing in ways that I didn’t realize. And I felt if that’s the way the Kenyan trustees want it to be, I guess that’s the way it will be. And I just took that defeatist approach. And that’s not the right way. You’ve got to keep your thumb on the pulse, at least, yeah?

[00:18:41] David: And this is where I think that, as you say, there’s a really interesting board. And that board has changed over the years.

[00:18:47] Polly: Yeah, it’s better, it’s a better board. It’s a better board and that helps too. Yeah. We let the old chart, the old whatever people who have been in university, education, we’ve let them retire. They got old, we let them retire, and we brought in some people who are a little bit more with it, what is needed now.

[00:19:11] David: And you know, you mentioned your privilege of being able to come in and help start something like this, but I’ve witnessed your sacrifice at coming in and actually putting so much of your life into something which you care so deeply about.

And I agree that you’re right, you’ve come from a position of privilege, but I’ve known many people in positions of privilege who don’t put in the grind that you do. And that’s what I appreciate so much is that you’ve stuck with it for 40 years!

[00:19:40] Polly: They’ve let me stick with them for 40 years.

[00:19:43] David: Absolutely.

[00:19:44] Polly: And once Manor House really takes off and it’s almost at that point where they don’t need me, they don’t need me financially, when it gets to the point where they don’t need me financially, that’s when my father would say, hey, you’ve succeeded.

[00:20:00] David: And I think this is the point, and I came in roughly, what was it now? It must’ve been, getting on for 10 years ago.

[00:20:08] Polly: Yeah.

[00:20:08] David: I can’t believe it’s been that long. It has been almost 10 years that I started getting involved and I think at that point, there was this sense that it had just gone through a really bad patch and you were wanting to step back, and you didn’t abandon it at that point where I think it would have been so easy for you to do so. But you’ve actually looked to get it to be rebirth, you know, and to help support it, and Beth has come in and played a critical role there and it’s not been the external support as we’ve mentioned, it’s the sort of people like David Mwangi on the ground, actually putting in the grind, but sticking with them and supporting them. I know how much he’s valued your support and others to be able to rebuild.

[00:20:52] Polly: We had the most wonderful time when we launched the new guest house, because so many of our alumni came. The people who I taught were there and it was so much fun and everybody had a wonderful time. I’m sorry you weren’t there with us, but…

[00:21:15] David: I’m also sorry I wasn’t there with you!

[00:21:17] Polly: But out of that also, every time that we invite the public to join us, people are pleased and they walk away with a new sense of encouragement. There’s something that they are more sure of they can do, and it makes them happy. And making people happy is a wonderful life, it’s a great way. I love my life.

[00:21:43] David: Yeah.

[00:21:43] Polly: I do.

[00:21:43] David: I want to finish this by just saying that, in some ways if you were starting this process now, the tools available to you are totally different from when you started in 84, as you say, as a young woman coming in with big ideas and with a desire to build something.

[00:22:04] Polly: Yeah.

[00:22:05] David: The word has moved on in certain ways. There’s a lot of recognition, Kenya is a different place in many wonderful ways. But also in terms of just the skill sets that exist on the ground.

[00:22:17] Polly: Yeah.

[00:22:17] David: And one of the big challenges that I’ve seen and I’ve observed in Manor House is keeping core to that root of who you’re serving and the cost that’s come of that, because one of the things which has happened quite a lot in Kenya is that a lot of organizations have been built then around a sort of culture where there’s a growing number of people with skills who are the people who are really running, how can I put this? Running a number of organizations because of how it attracts the funding cycles and they get caught up in short term funding cycles.

[00:23:00] Polly: Sure, yeah, and I’m sure that would be very that would be the thing that would draw them because, even the people like the director of an institution, he’s got his staff, he wants to make sure he’s going to be able to pay them six months from now. And he’s got his nose to the grindstone to satisfy the funding organization. And it makes them have to do things that don’t necessarily have the best impact on their target audience. For Manor House, it’s always the target audience.

[00:23:35] David: Exactly. This is, I think one of the distinguishing factors and it’s where, yes, there have been funding problems, there’ve been a number of other challenges, it’s not been easy for Manor House. But what has been so impressive to me is that target audience of serving smallholder agriculture, that hasn’t been compromised.

[00:23:53] Polly: Yeah.

[00:23:53] David: And all the time I’ve been involved, it’s been tough with funding cycles and all the other things, but that ability to keep focusing on the smallholder agriculture, this has been something which Manor House has suddenly got this history, which is not without its problems, but is so impressive.

Actually keeping that core focus and having a sort of relatively, how can I put this, a relatively young staff group by and large.

[00:24:20] Polly: That’s true.

[00:24:21] David: You’ve got some real youth and potential talent coming up.

[00:24:26] Polly: Yeah.

[00:24:27] David: And there’s real hope that this sort of actually the time is right.

And I want to just finish this by mentioning the sort of, the magic term in some sense right now of agroecology.

[00:24:38] Polly: Yes.

[00:24:39] David: Which is where, when you look back, you’ve been doing this all along, but it now has a name which is globally recognized, more widely, than I think other terms have been recognized.

[00:24:51] Polly: Tell me, tell me this term.

[00:24:53] David: Agroecology.

[00:24:55] Polly: Oh, okay. That one I know. That’s what I studied at UC Santa Cruz.

[00:25:00] David: This is the thing, this has a long history, but if you think about Kenya, I still remember a workshop a few years ago where we were working over across two workshops, it was 30 or something local organizations.

[00:25:12] Polly: Yes.

[00:25:13] David: And we were discussing agroecology as a concept and many of them were coming in from conservation agriculture, from organic agriculture, and from so many other terms.

[00:25:23] Polly: Yes.

[00:25:23] David: And what was so interesting is they all found that agroecology resonated. And it’s something which…

[00:25:32] Polly: Yeah, it’s something that really means something that people understand. Because it’s not about all the other stuff that is man created, but it’s what’s real. The agriculture that really recognizes ecology as the driving power behind every interaction in the farm system. It’s the things that you have to respect, and once you understand ecology better, then you can be a better farmer.

[00:25:59] David: Yeah, and, the fact that agroecology is now recognised by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, FAO.

[00:26:06] Polly: Yep.

[00:26:07] David: And it’s getting recognised in a way which I’m not trying to criticise the organic movement at all, in this sort of way. But organic always had a connotation which was around…

[00:26:19] Polly: We’re better than you!

[00:26:22] David: Exactly! and it was for some people and not for others. Whereas agroecology, organic practices fall under good agroecology, but agroecology as a set of principles is not as well, how can I put this? It’s not about certification, or it’s not about differentiating. It’s about helping people to recognise a form of agriculture, which is exactly what your small holder agricultures were trying to do with you back when you started and which you learned from them and they learned from you and that co learning. And co learning is one of the sort of parts of agroecology.

[00:26:56] Polly: And sustainability is the big word also out there. Nobody wants to go and fund something that’s not going to be sustainable. How is this money, this seed money that I put here, how is it going to make a plant grow? That can continue to grow. That’s the idea of sustainability for those in the foundation and grant programs, they want to know how it’s sustainable. So even for us, hey, I would talk to you about other things. I would talk to you about our community forest association, I would talk to you about our water resource users association and the great things that we’re doing with water and with trees, because water and trees are also part of agroecology.

[00:27:37] David: Of course, and what I love about that is, and this is probably another episode, because we’re going to run out of time on this one, but these initiatives are independent and interrelated with the Manor House story. They are things which are happening, as I understand it, at the community level.

[00:27:55] Polly: Yes.

[00:27:56] David: In the region, in the Tranzoia region around Kitale.

[00:27:59] Polly: Yep.

[00:28:00] David: And Manor House has a voice, but it’s not the leading actor.

[00:28:03] Polly: No. No. We just help do the teaching. We’re the place where the conference can happen, and we feed them really well with nice, nice food that is healthy for them, and so they love that part of it. And then we give them a nice place to sleep, and this helps us to now teach, because it’s through conferences and workshops, that we are able to earn enough money to basically teach, and reach out.

[00:28:30] David: Yes.

[00:28:31] Polly: Extension is very expensive. Extension has been a weakness for us because it’s hard to travel.

[00:28:38] David: Yes. And I think, I guess the best place for me to try and finish this episode is really about this element that, one of the forces I think that has meant that Manor House has had these sorts of long reaches, it’s never been a flash in the pan.

[00:28:55] Polly: No.

[00:28:55] David: It’s always been a slow burn.

[00:28:57] Polly: Yeah.

[00:28:58] David: And that slow burn, I can say as an outsider who’s now, I’ve always remained on the periphery of this. I’ve benefited from workshops where I’ve eaten, as you said, quite nicely and…

[00:29:07] Polly: The beds are better and you get your own bathroom now.

[00:29:11] David: Oh yes, no I never worried too much about that. But. I like the old guest house and I’ve even stayed in other places within Manor House. There’s a whole range of accommodation. And I’ve enjoyed it all. And it’s always been such an incredible experience.

And really what I’d like to finish this episode on is this sort of reflection from my perspective, that, as an outsider, who, when I first came in, there were so many issues that were needing to be addressed. And I didn’t know anything about Manor House. And then I started to talk to people at the university where I used to work, in the agricultural space.

[00:29:52] Polly: You were encouraged because they knew of us.

[00:29:56] David: Exactly. It’s not just that they knew of you. They knew of the history of what it had done and the role it had played. And they knew it wasn’t playing that role now, as there were different universities and so on. That role had, the world had evolved. And in some sense, Manor House hadn’t kept up. And then to see it reinventing itself in the new age while keeping its core focus, oh that’s an absolute pleasure for me to see bits of that. And I know that journey isn’t finished. And I really, as you say, your efforts to step back, but stay in touch and really make sure that this is something where this rejuvenation is happening it’s been great to see.

[00:30:34] Polly: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the recognition. And I hope you’ll remain close whenever you’re in Kenya. Yeah, you make sure you call me. Let me know where you are.

[00:30:45] David: I look forward to coming back again at some point. I should be in Kenya maybe later this year.

[00:30:50] Polly: Cool.

[00:30:50] David: So we will hopefully meet up then.

[00:30:52] Polly: Very nice. Thank you so much David.