edic, known as burr clover in  California, or nefel to Arab shepherds, is a plant from the genus Medicago that shows promise in the improvement of sown pastures in the West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region. Native to the Mediterranean, it is a pasture plant which is very palatable to sheep. It has become the basis of a multi-million dollar business in Australia. In the WANA region, nearly all farmers with animals know medic and appreciate it for its benefits to milk and meat production, taste and quality. It is an annual legume that could be exploited for use by sheep--if farmers have access to an economic seed supply. To break that bottleneck, ICARDA has designed and produced low-cost sweeping and threshing machines.
     Before describing this machinery, it is necessary to explain why medics are important, and how ICARDA became involved with them. In Australia, rotation of medic with cereals--ley farming--has long been a success. ICARDA thought that medic pasture could also replace fallow in the cereal-fallow systems in WANA. This would have a double benefit. It would avoid the dangers of  cereal monocropping--pests, diseases and declining soil fertility. And it would provide pasture for sheep and goats. Livestock are central to the lives of millions                                           

of  people in the region, as they provide meat, wool and milk, and contribute to soil fertility.
     However, farmers really wanted a feed crop they could harvest, and after consultation with farming communities ICARDA has been working with vetch for this purpose--and this has been a success (see Twins and triplets at Tarhin, p14). In the meantime, we realized that medics had an alternative use: reseeding and restoring marginal land, a crucial grazing resource that is often degraded in the region. So ICARDA and the Syrian National Program collected, evaluated and multiplied a supply of selected annual species that would work in Syria, while national colleagues elsewhere in WANA also identified their own locally-adapted ecotypes. The problem was that farmers do not cultivate medic as they do in Australia, because, although ICARDA can provide small quantities of suitable locally-adapted seed,  there has hitherto been no machinery for collecting and threshing it.
     Medic grows naturally on common grazing lands, which are now mostly degraded from overgrazing and no longer contain much medic. It usually grows in places which receive an average of 150-450 mm rainfall a year;  growth depends on species, distribution of rainfall, grazing pressure and soil characteristics at the site. However, where plants are grazed to the ground before producing flowers, no seed is set--one of the

major causes of land degradation in WANA region.  Even where medic is present, seed collection has hitherto been uneconomic; when the crop matures, the pods tend to fall to the ground. ICARDA knew of no farmers who were collecting their own medic seed. If they are to be persuaded to prepare nursery plots, they need  a simple way to collect pods so that they can sow them again to create improved pasture.
      All of the medics have fairly similar, round and coiled pods, with various degrees of spininess. Until now, the pods have been too difficult to harvest efficiently. Now ICARDA, working with local fabrication workshops, has developed three machines that can provide an economic answer.
     The medic pod sweeper makes the task manageable. It has no engine and is pushed by hand, like a lawn-mower--which it very much resembles.
    Built in prototype form by ICARDA itself and then produced in numbers by the Faraj Allah Edlebi company of Aleppo, the sweeper is easy to move around, and can collect many kinds of legume pods and seed heads. A brush assembly,  rotating around a horizontal axis against the direction of travel, sweeps light material from the soil surface into a removable catch basket. When the ground is even,  the sweeper can collect most of the pods in a single pass. If the soil