Uzbek farmers exchange knowledge with Sammamish Valley

On Thursday, Nov. 3, a delegation of farmers from Tashkent, Uzbekistan visited several farms in the Sammamish Valley as part of a tour organized by the Seattle-Tashkent Sister City Association (STSCA).

In 1973, Seattle and the Central Asian city formed the first Soviet-American sister city bond, establishing a formal, citizen-level link between the warring nuclear empires. The association will be celebrating its 50th anniversary next year.

During the week of Oct. 28-Nov. 4, the delegation visited agricultural locales throughout the Seattle area, including the 21 Acres Center, the University District Farmers Market and Pike Place Market.

Maruf Butaev, a member of the Uzbekistan Ministry of Agriculture, spoke during a presentation on Uzbek farming at the University of Washington. The presentation was translated into English by Almurad Kasym.

“Over the course of centuries and millennia, we have shaped the culture of how to preserve, how to grow, when and how much irrigation should be utilized, et cetera,” Butaev said.

Agriculture is one of the largest sectors of the Uzbek economy, making up for about 20% of the GDP. Cotton is the primary agricultural export, but more than 350 different crops are cultivated.

Uzbekistan is bordered by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. Though most of the landlocked country sits in the desert, the east side, where Tashkent is located, experiences all four seasons, Butaev said.

“Agricultural products of all kinds, as well as vegetables and the fruits we have–I don’t want to say all of them, maybe there's something you have in Seattle that we don't back home–but I want to say we have lots of different kinds of products,” he said.

Uzbekistan is also researching methods to combat and adapt to climate change, Butaev said.

“What we're spending money on when it comes to agricultural research is water conservancy, prevention of soil degradation and adaptation to climate changes of flora and fauna in Uzbekistan,” he said. “Based on the climate and the topography, we have to use water conservation technology, so we’re vigorously researching into the processes and methods and amounts of water conservancy.”

On Nov. 3, the delegation visited Viva Farms in the Sammamish Valley, a nonprofit farm incubator, to discuss the business side of farming in the U.S. and Uzbekistan.

Kakhramon Ishmukhamedov, a technologist and engineer at an Uzbek fertilizer company, asked Viva Farms education manager Micah Anderson about the organization’s nonprofit structure.

“With the nonprofit status, we are not paying taxes,” Anderson said. “We can make a profit. It just has to be invested back into the organization.” He explained that Viva Farms trains student farmers, who often go on to operate their own small for-profit farms. The organization gets its funding from governmental and private grants, and by selling produce grown by students.

While in the Sammamish Valley, the delegation also visited the 21 Acres Center in Woodinville and Jubilee Farms in Carnation.

The Seattle-Tashkent Sister City Association was founded by former Seattle mayor Wesley Uhlman in 1973. Co-chair Rosanne Royer, who has been with the organization since it was founded, said that Uhlman “had studied Russian himself in the army, and just found it to be tragic that we couldn’t connect with the Soviet Union on some citizen level.”

“Dozens of people were ready to establish some kind of an exchange. I mean, they just came out of the woodwork,” she continued. “It was so important to all of us who were worried about nuclear war at the time to take advantage of this.”

According to Human Rights Watch, Uzbekistan is a largely authoritarian nation, though progress in human rights has come about under President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who assumed office in 2016; the previous president, Islam Karimov, led the country since it declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

Still, human rights abuses against women as well as gender and sexual minorities continue, as do forced labor and child labor, particularly in the cotton industry.

“Central Asia is a part of the world that people ought to know more about,” Royer said. “I mean, they have trading partners with countries or nations that are actually kind of our enemies right now, our big competitors. So it's extremely important, I think, that we have a foothold for some friendship and exchange, and keeping the doors open.”