When Sgt. First Class Darrell Rowe’s Army bosses told him they were sending him for a week of beekeeping and tree pruning here in California’s fertile Central Valley, he was irked.
Familiarizing soon-to-be deployed service members like Sergeant Rowe with basic information about Afghanistan’s crops and farming traditions is precisely the point of a new one-week training program developed by the federal Agriculture Department.
This is boot camp where soldiers are more likely to learn about manure than about M-4 rifles with grenade launchers.
Military officials send recruits from across the country to Central California because it shares many agroclimatic characteristics with Afghanistan — fertile valleys, semi-arid plains and mountains — and can serve as a kind of geographical laboratory.
“We can replicate on our demonstration farm exactly the types of conditions these troops will find on the ground,” said Bill Erysian, director of Agricultural Development for Afghanistan Pre-Deployment Training, or Adapt, a program based at California State University, Fresno.
