Notwithstanding this gloomy picture, however, an extremely significant development had in fact occurred, almost unnoticed, and without any assistance or aid from the Protectorate authorities. This was the gradual adoption of sorghum cultivation in the western part of the territory (in Borama and Hargeisa Districts), far from the scene of the Dervish operations in the centre and east. From shortly before the turn of the century, the Gadabursi clan and sections of the Habar Awal (especially the Jibril Abokor) living in the higher and better-watered land in the west had begun to follow the example of their kinsmen in the Jigjiga region of clearing areas of bush and planting sorghum, the ground being tilled by ox-drawn wooden ploughs. This comparatively advanced system of cultivation, strikingly different from the hand hoe technique employed in southern Somalia, seems to have been pioneered locally by a few religious settlements from which it soon spread to the surrounding clansmen. Far from hindering this economic revolution, the effect of the Dervish war appears on the contrary to have stimulated it by creating a highly lucrative market for local grain. For those nomads who turned to cultivation still retained an interest in livestock and were not thus completely dependent for subsistence on their crops. To some extent at least, they produced a cash crop which was traded locally with the pastoral nomads in the centre and east of the Protectorate.

I.M. Lewis, I. M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Som…, loc. 285