Maize seed and fertilizer on credit is what One Acre Fund does best in Kenya. But there are many areas of the country where maize cultivation on credit simply does not make economic sense. In these locations, low rainfall and poor soil conditions virtually guarantee weak maize harvests. One Acre Fund wants to help smallholder farmers increase their harvests in these areas too, which means we must adapt our core program model to different crops and farming conditions.

To learn about the challenges of working in low rainfall areas, we recently started a new trial program in a dryland district bordering Lake Victoria in Nyanza Province. The program is only a few months old, but we have already started tackling two significant challenges: low population density and limited water access.

Low rainfall tends to correlate with low population density throughout the world, and Kenya is no exception. Low population density is challenging for numerous reasons. First, One Acre Fund’s service model entails frequent contact between field officers and farmers. When farmers live further apart, this contact becomes more time consuming, as well as more costly. Second, fewer farmers means fewer potential clients, which means our trial program will require a higher adoption percentage than most One Acre Fund districts to reach sustainability. In high-density areas, enrolling 10 percent of households in the first year would be considered a major win. In a low-density area, with fewer households to serve, we must enroll closer to 40 percent of households to achieve the same level of sustainability. To accomplish this target, we are experimenting with field officer transport and farmer mobilization to maximize our ability to reach clients.

Our second major challenge is water access. In our existing districts in Kenya, high rainfall levels are conducive to growing maize. In our trial program, we are offering tree and bean inputs to farmers. But even tree seeds need a fair amount of water—they must be cultivated in water-hungry nurseries during the dry season prior to transplant during the rains. Other One Acre Fund districts planting trees use seed beds as nurseries, which require 20-40 liters of water per day. Many farmers in the dryland district must walk an hour or more each day to access this amount of water. It’s possible that farmers will be willing to invest the labor to produce healthy tree seedlings, but there is no way to guarantee full adoption.

To address this problem, we are developing a less water-intensive planting method involving smaller bucket nurseries. This method should allow farmers to plant the same number of seeds using only around 2 liters of water per day. After a few months in the buckets, seedlings are transplanted into perforated tubes. Five hundred tubed seedlings only require 15-20 liters of water per day. By significantly reducing the amount of water needed, we hope to save our farmers time and money and ensure that they have strong tree seedlings for transplant during the rains.

This is only the first season for the dryland district. We plan to open a trial nursery this summer to experiment with alternative low-rainfall crops, including peanuts, millet, and short-maturity maize varieties. We are focused on offering products and services that are adapted to the challenges our clients face. Through this “farmers first” strategy, we plan to help dryland farmers achieve the same income increases that our other One Acre Fund farmers have achieved.

Accessing high-quality seed varieties is a major challenge for rural East African farmers. One Acre Fund currently solves part of this problem by providing improved maize varieties to poor rural farmers. Establishing an efficient maize seed supply system for rural farmers is relatively straightforward because there is a well-established market for maize seed; One Acre Fund simply acts as the intermediary between the commercial seed industry and rural buyers. But how can we offer this same service for commodities that do not have a developed formal seed industry?

Beans, although a major crop for East African farmers, lack any semblance of a formal seed distribution system. Why? Seed supply bottlenecks typically affect self-pollinating crops such as beans. Self-pollinating crops are simply unprofitable for seed companies because of volatile demand caused by competition from farm-saved seed, transportation and storage difficulties, and strong regionally specific preferences.

One Acre Fund is experimenting with a few different models to offer high-quality bean seed to our farmers, despite the lack of commercial availability. Our first trial is to source high-quality seed from research centers such as the Kenyan Agricultural Research Institute (KARI), and to contract large-scale seed multipliers to produce these varieties in the quantity we need. This model is attractive due to the ways in which it simplifies quality control and standardizes production processes.

Another model that we are getting under way in Kenya, but that our Rwanda operation already uses, is known as the “outgrower model.” Here, we provide improved seed varieties to member farmers with large (2-3 acres) land holdings, buy back their bean harvests, and treat the beans to be used as seed. This model has advantages for our farmers in that it integrates them into the seed production system, offering them the opportunity for greater profits and the ability to supply their own communities with seed in the absence of commercial suppliers.

The success of either of these trials would not only boost the yields of rural bean farmers but could potentially have long-term regional environmental and food security benefits. Because the bean seed available on the market right now is such low quality, many farmers recognize that bean cultivation is an unprofitable activity and opt to grow maize season after season. This results in widespread soil degradation and a net decrease in maize yields. Making beans profitable will improve soil quality by incentivizing crop rotation. Many of our Kenyan farmers want to rotate their maize crop with a bean crop, but they just don’t have access to bean seed for planting.

Another benefit of improved varieties is their resistance to common diseases that wipe out large portions of bean crops in East Africa. One Acre Fund is experimenting with a variety that is resistant to an untreatable disease called bean root rot, a soil-borne disease that can cause yield losses of up to 70 percent.

Creative solutions to East Africa’s defunct bean seed supply system will not only increase the incomes of One Acre Fund’s farmers, they will also diversify the types of crops that rural farmers rely on for income generation. Diversification is good for household nutrition, long-term soil health, and regional food security—it helps individual farmers as well as the community.

One Acre Fund is scaling at a rapid pace. Last year we were serving 8,000 farmers—now we are serving 22,000 farmers in Kenya and Rwanda. We plan to reach 70,000 farmers by 2012, and one million farmers by 2020. Despite our aggressive growth and future targets, there are still millions of farmers in Kenya that we will not reach for many years.

Our farmers benefit from the One Acre Fund “market bundle”–the inputs we provide on credit, education to use those inputs correctly, and market access at harvest time. While all parts of the bundle are important, inputs and education drive the majority of the threefold increase in crop production our farmers experience.

One of the ways for us to reach additional farmers beyond our targets is to disseminate the One Acre Fund model via another organization. With that goal in mind, we have designed a One Acre Fund planting kit that explains the basic principles our field officers teach our farmers during their education sessions.

This season, we are doing a trial in which we distribute the kit to 1,000 farmers who are buying fertilizer in Bungoma. Farmers are given a brief training on how to use the kit to improve their crop yields when they receive it. These kits cost a little over $0.50 USD. Our goal is to improve farmers’ maize production by 10 percent, which would represent a $30 increase in income, a tremendous return on investment. At harvest in August, we will have our first opportunity to view results on the effectiveness of the kits.

The kit consists of:

Fertilizer scoop

A small, plastic tool with two different-sized scoops on either end of the handle. The larger end is used to measure the correct amount of planting fertilizer to apply to maize seeds. The smaller end is used to measure the correct amount of top-dress fertilizer to apply to maize crops, twice per season.

This solves a major problem with inappropriate dosing of fertilizer and top dress, as farmers traditionally just take a pinch and broadcast it down a row of seed/plants.

Planting string

A nylon or manila string 40 meters long with spray-painted markings every 25 centimeters to mark where each seed should be planted. The length of the string matches the suggested length of the rows. The interval between the markings matches the proper spacing for maize seeds. The string is to be strung down the row between two sticks.

This solves a major problem with inappropriate spacing, whereby farmers typically just drop seeds as they walk along the row, more or less dropping one seed per stride, but rarely with any consistency.

Planting rod and top dress spacer

This is a hollow PVC pipe, currently 75 centimeters in length. Several centimeters from the bottom, a large nail is drilled through.

The rod serves several purposes:

1)    To measure the proper distance between rows (75 centimeters), the rod is placed on the soil to mark where the next row should start.

2)    For top-dress fertilizer application, a hole is poked several centimeters from the corn stalk–using the nail to measure–and top dress is scooped into the hole.

Planting instruction sheet

This is a simple, picture-oriented instruction sheet on how to use the contents of the kit to properly plant and apply fertilizer.