Many One Acre Fund farmers must rent oxen-pulled plows in order to prepare their fields for planting. The cost can be $30 USD or more per acre each year. For our farmers, this is a huge investment, and it is one they choose to make because plowing helps with weed control. However, some agriculture researchers say that plowing has long-term negative consequences for soil health.
What if our farmers didn’t have to pay to plow their fields, could still control weeds, and were making their land more drought resistant? Recently, One Acre Fund started to look at how a movement called conservation agriculture might help us increase and sustain the impact our organization has on farmer income. Conservation agriculture has the potential to help One Acre Fund’s farmers reduce their plowing expenses as well as tend to long-term soil health.
Conservation agriculture, which also goes by names like “no till,” “reduced till,” and “conservation tillage,” has produced a lot of research showing the benefits of elimination and/or reduction of plowing on farmland. Those benefits include increased water retention in soil, increased nutrient retention in soil, decreased run-off from farmland, and more drought-resistant crops. While conservation agriculture techniques are common in Latin America, so far African countries are seeing slow uptake.
Part of the reason for slow uptake in Africa might be the complications of a conservation agriculture farm system. In conservation agriculture, more crops are grown throughout the year because it is necessary to “cover” the farmland with continuous cropping. This constant coverage allows the soil to retain water and suppresses weeds. As crops are harvested, the leftover becomes nutritive and protective mulch for the soil. Over time, this process enriches the soil.
Such a process would present many challenges for One Acre Fund’s farmers. Conservation agriculture is much more complicated than the method our farmers currently use. Most conservation agriculture systems would add three or four crops to tend throughout the year, weeding challenges, and possible increases in disease. To be successful, farmers will have to figure out which crops are appropriate to rotate, and at which times. At the moment, the intercropping of beans with maize is a common practice, and one that can be soil friendly when done correctly.
Farmers will also inevitably have to overcome major weeding problems, either through investing in herbicides or enormous amounts of manual weeding. Finally, farmers will also have to contend with the increase in crop disease that comes with well-mulched soil that is more moist. In most currently running conservation agriculture farmlands, there is also the need to develop or import new machines that don’t quite plow the soil, but “rip” special lines or dig specific types of holes for planting.
Recently, an OAF program associate visited some smallholder farmers in the Nanyuki area of Kenya who have adopted conservation agriculture systems. Most of the benefits of the system were in evidence: Soils were improving, some farmers had recorded increased drought resistance after only three years of conservation agriculture practices, and the crop-rotation style looked like it could boost incomes. However, the farms clearly required a lot of hands-on technical assistance when problems came up. The farmers also had incomes slightly above the average income of our farmers. They were able to make investments into herbicides and run irrigation projects on their farms, for instance.
Plowing is an ingrained practice for One Acre Fund’s farmers. To stop plowing, farmers will want to see immediate benefits. However, it can take years for farmers to realize environmental and financial benefits from implementing a conservation agriculture system. At One Acre Fund, we are currently thinking about how we could integrate some conservation agriculture practices into our work that would not place an outsized financial burden on our farmers in the first year of implementation. Many of our farmers need to make sure they can grow enough food to feed their families; a system like conservation agriculture will only work if it first ensures basic food security for our farm families.
The past two weeks have been very busy for One Acre Fund. In every district in Kenya our farmers have started planting. After delivering 300 tons of fertilizer to over 10,000 farmers, and after training each and every farmer how best to plant using this fertilizer, the moment of truth has arrived. If our trainings have been communicated effectively and farmers plant as we taught them, they can hope to yield 15 bags of maize from one acre of land. If our trainings were done poorly and farmers keep to their old methods of planting, they will not yield more than 5 bags. That is how big a difference our planting methods can make—10 bags of maize, or $150 USD!
The One Acre Fund planting method is more labor intensive that the traditional method, but it is easy to follow. The first thing we teach our farmers is even spacing of seeds. If seeds are too close, they will compete for sunlight and nutrients, resulting in malnourished plants. If seeds are too far apart, land is wasted. The tool we use for spacing of seeds is a planting string—a long string with a mark every 25cm showing where a seed should be placed. The mark can be created using old bottle caps, or colored pieces of plastic bags. The planting string is cheap and easy to make, and we ask every farmer group we work with to make one.
All 12,000 of One Acre Fund’s farmers in Kenya receive their maize seed and fertilizer in the same week at the end of February. One day, I went out to meet an input delivery truck and see some deliveries. It had been raining all morning, and our field director had delayed sending out the truck because he was worried it would get stuck on one of the muddy, potholed roads the trucks must navigate to reach our farmers.
“I will feed my family, and then I will pay school fees,” one woman said.
In western Kenya, where power outages are frequent and Internet access is unreliable at best, we face many IT challenges. Luckily, we have a talented team of people who are adept at troubleshooting and quickly fixing problems—from database flaws to viruses to network problems.
Viruses are a common problem at One Acre Fund, mostly because we must rely on public Internet access. Since many of our districts do not have power, they cannot run a router. Phone modems often do not work because the cell phone towers are too overloaded. The simple solution for a bookkeeper is to pop over to a cyber café and download all her emails and necessary materials to work for the day. But if the cyber café’s computer is infected, the bookkeeper’s flash drive gets the virus and passes it on to our district netbooks. It’s very likely this happened in Kakamega.
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.
