All over western Kenya, farmers are harvesting their maize. Walking through the fields, you will see some farmers cutting down maize stalks, others shucking maize from its husks, and still others drying kernels on plastic sheets in the sun. One Acre Fund’s farmers planted four different varieties of maize, and each matures at a different time. Our farmer groups are able to help one another harvest, because not everyone’s maize is ready simultaneously.

Christine Wafula, a farmer in Chwele District, harvested her maize with help from her family and some of the members of her group. As she shucked maize and threw the cobs into a pile, she talked about the change in her harvest. She estimated that she would harvest 10 bags of maize on ½ acre of land this year. This is a significant improvement—last year she only harvested 3 bags on ½ acre of land.

“With One Acre Fund, we spend little and we harvest much,” she said. “I have come to realize that most of the time, with the way we planted before, we wasted our fertilizer.”

Before joining One Acre Fund, many farmers used a planting method that mixed seed and fertilizer in a long furrow. The fertilizer would often burn the seed, leading to a low harvest.

Nearby, Parnifin Wafula, Christine’s husband, was listening as he shucked maize. He added:

“This was a trial. After seeing how the harvest has been, I am very happy.”

Christine and Parnifin have five children—Brian, Elisa, Aaron, Manuel, and Daniel. They are focused on improving the productivity of their farm and providing for their family. In fact, they are planning to plant beans with One Acre Fund during the short rains season. As soon as they finish harvesting their maize, they will prepare the land for planting beans. Next year, they will take a larger loan from One Acre Fund to plant 1 full acre of maize.

With the harvests she hopes to receive from beans and maize, Christine wants to buy a dairy cow. For now, though, she is happy that she has grown enough maize to feed her entire family.

As the rainy season in Kenya draws to a close, our farmers are starting to get ready to harvest their maize. In Chwele District, the difference between the maize of One Acre Fund farmers and non-One Acre Fund farmers is stark. At the beginning of June, one of Chwele’s farmers, Violet Laisa, stood on the edge of her maize field holding a baby in her arms. Her dark green maize stalks soared over her head, and they were covered with sizeable cobs.

Violet planted Pannar seed and plans to harvest at the end of June. Pannar is a fast-growing variety of maize, and it has performed well for our farmers this year. One Acre Fund provides professionally grown hybrid seed, and we allow our farmers to choose between several different varieties. Hybrid seed is naturally grown and selected for higher yields and drought resistance—it is not genetically modified.

Violet liked Pannar so much that she has a cloth with the Pannar logo that she likes to tie over her skirt. When farmers use improved seed for the first time, they are often amazed at how well it performs—and they become loyal customers.

Violet said she hoped to harvest ten bags of maize on ½ acre of land, double what she harvested last year. One Acre Fund farmers generally double to triple their yields in one growing season. This increase means that Violet will have enough maize to feed her family this year—last year, she didn’t.

Violet raises five children, but only two of them are hers—Ian, who is nine months old, and Regan, who is three. The other children belonged to her husband’s first wife, but after she passed away, Violet adopted them.

Though she is raising five children and managing her fields, Violet also holds a leadership position in her group. In fact, she had already finished repaying her loan—a full three months before the repayment deadline.

In the next growing season, which begins in August, Violet plans to plant beans. Early repayment of her maize loan means that she is eligible to receive beans and fertilizer from One Acre Fund. Like many farmers in Chwele District, Violet saw that One Acre Fund farmers had good bean harvests last year. Beans are a good crop for home consumption, and they fetch a good price at the market. Next year, Violet wants to plant 1 acre of maize with One Acre Fund, and a good bean harvest will help her earn enough income to repay a larger loan.

Water leaks into the house, spilling down the wall and flowing onto the floor, adding to the small stream that cuts through the bedroom and sitting room in this small mud hut. Mary Martin, the hut’s owner, is surprisingly upbeat. “I’m not happy about the hole in the wall, but at least I can afford to fix it,” she says.

Mary, 37, who lives in Kenya’s Nyanza province, is not new to hardship. Her parents died years ago and her only two siblings both passed away within the past three years. In 2003 her husband died of AIDS, leaving Mary to raise their three children on her own. With little formal education and no assets other than the land on which they live plus a few animals, there was only one way for Mary to provide for her family: farming.

With declining harvests over the last five years, however, even the family’s most basic needs were hard to meet; her children ate less each day, medical and school bills were constant concerns and repairs or improvements to the house were simply not affordable. Last year was particularly bad – Mary only harvested one sack of maize.

The small harvest, though, was certainly not a result of indifference; Mary wakes up each morning at five, prepares her children for school, heads to the field at six, returns a few hours later to prepare lunch for her three children and then continues her work in the field until they return from school.

Desperate to grow more, Mary was excited when she first heard about One Acre Fund. Her excitement grew when she attended a One Acre Fund community meeting last summer. “I wanted to join right away to grow more – to have more food for my family.”

Although this season’s harvest is still a month away, Mary face brightens when she talks about her maize. “All my neighbors are very jealous,” she says. It’s difficult to predict the size of her harvest, but both Mary and the One Acre Fund staff member for her area expect her field to produce at least three to four times more maize than last season. Mary knows things are not perfect – she has to repair the hole in her wall and recently took one of her children to the hospital for malaria – but her improved harvests give her hope. When asked if she will work with One Acre Fund next season, her response is pragmatic and direct: “I have to – my family needs to eat.”

During input delivery week in February, I met many farmers who were excited to pick up their seed and fertilizer. One of these farmers, Bethsheba Nanjala, recently invited me to visit her farm. She proudly showed me where she and her husband had each planted ½ acre of maize using the One Acre Fund planting method. Bethsheba planted relatively late in the season, so her maize was just starting to germinate. She asked me to come back in a month or so, when the maize would be as high as her knees.

As we walked back to her house to have some tea, I noticed that there were many trees on her property, some quite large. She pointed out two grevallia trees that were over ten years old, a few jacaranda trees, and a small stand of grevallia trees that appeared about two years old. She also showed me her tree nursery, where she was cultivating grevallia seedlings for transplant.

“I love trees,” she told me, explaining that she was so happy when One Acre Fund provided grevallia tree seeds this year. “I want to plant a row of grevallia from here to here.” She motioned from one end of her front yard to the beginning of her maize field. She planned to plant a row of trees to separate her home from her field.

Bethsheba had a lot of experience with trees. As a child, her father would bring trees from as far away as Mombasa to plant on their land. After she finished secondary school, she got a job with the Ministry of Agriculture in Kakamega, where she completed training courses on tree cultivation and conservation agriculture. She proudly showed me a certificate from one of her tree courses.

Unfortunately, the job was a temporary one, and after that, Bethsheba could not find another job with trees. Now, she is married and has five children, whom she struggles to care for. Her husband has another wife with six children, and they must share his salary from his job at a restaurant in town.

Bethsheba’s eldest daughter, Spora, is almost ready to enter secondary school. She is an above average student, and she dreams of becoming a TV journalist. But Bethsheba is not sure she will be able to afford the school fees for Spora. She hopes that if her One Acre Fund maize harvest is good, she will send Spora to secondary school.

“I have confidence,” she told me, “I will struggle and see that she has joined secondary school until she finishes Form 4.”

“I have to be busy because I have a lot of mouths to feed,” Grace Alande explains. Although Grace, 58, retired from teaching three years ago, she continues to assume responsibilities within her family and in her village. At home, she cares for her husband who suffered strokes in 2000 and 2007 and, as a result, is partly paralyzed. Grace is also raising three of her grandchildren. The children’s mothers, two of Grace’s daughters, passed away from HIV/AIDS several years ago.

Grace lives in Nyanza Province, western Kenya, one of the poorest provinces in the country. In her village, Kabonyo, Grace and several of her neighbors help support widows in the area. ”It’s not easy for some people to find work,” Grace says, ”and everyone needs to eat.”  But food has been in increasingly short supply. “Every year is worse,” Grace says, “and last year was the very worst.” Grace’s family owns several acres, but they only produced ten 90kg sacks of maize, drastically down from the fifty sacks the land produced just fifteen years ago.

Her declining harvests and growing number of mouths to feed attracted Grace to One Acre Fund’s initial meetings in her area last fall. Her curiosity turned into excitement after learning about the details of the program. ”The methods make a lot of sense,” she says, claiming they remind her of the methods her father used when she was a girl. “We used to harvest much more when I was a child.” Days after the initial One Acre Fund meeting, she recruited most of her neighbors to form a group. Not surprisingly, they chose Grace to be their leader.

Although planting is only beginning now, she is excited for the harvest in August. “I think this will be a good year,” she claims. After the harvest, she plans to sell a few sacks to pay for her grandchildren’s school fees and materials. Making sure all three grandchildren complete high school is one of her main goals. The other, a bit more immediately, is to feed all the mouths around her. One thing’s for sure: “I’m not going to sit around and wait for better harvests – I’m going to work for it.”