Along the waterways and fields of Botswana's Okavango region, farmers stand at a familiar crossroads between tradition and necessity — this time pressed by the approaching shadow of El Niño, which threatens to bring the 2026/27 rainy season with too little rain and too much heat. At the Samochima harvest festival, agricultural officers offered not alarm but counsel: return to the older, hardier crops — millet, sorghum, beans — that ask less of a reluctant sky. It is a quiet reminder that resilience, in agriculture as in life, often lies not in conquering conditions but in learning to read them