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.”
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?
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.
Using this market data, we are starting to bring products to the market to help reduce costs for farmers. Our first product, an LED solar-powered desk lamp, costs around $20 USD. The lamp charges by a solar panel the size of a wallet during the day and lasts over five hours at night. It also functions as a cell-phone charger. If a farmer used the money he would spend on kerosene each day to pay for the lamp, he would own it in under three months. After that, he would be saving $80 USD per year for the next several years.