News to Raise Yields

Sadik Sad­ique, a maize farmer from Trans Nzoia County is has been able to double his crop pro­duc­tion by ad­opt­ing new meth­ods of plant­ing which in­clude in­creas­ing spa­cing and ad­opt­ing soil test­ing to de­term­ine fer­til­iser ratio fol­low­ing ex­perts’ ad­vice.

In 2016 used to pro­duce 500-600 kilos per acre from his 700 acres farm but this changed in 2017 when he con­sul­ted ag­ro­nom­ists from, a com­pany that was es­tab­lished in 1989 in East Africa con­tin­ues to change the lives of many local farm­ers in the area.

His pro­duc­tion has since doubled to 1000-1500 kilos per acre.

“When Cropnuts ex­perts first vis­ited my farm, I was plant­ing 2-3 plants per meter and they in­creased it to 4-6 plants per meter which trans­late to 24,000 plants per acre this is some of the changes they made to­gether with car­ry­ing out soil test and ad­vising on the best ratio for ap­ply­ing fer­til­izer,” said.

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Be­sides giv­ing ex­pert ad­vice to small-scale farm­ers to help them get more crop yield from their farms, the com­pany also of­fers farm in­puts at a fee.

“We use Sun­belt farm as a model to show what suc­cess­ful mod­ern farm­ing is. Mod­ern farm­ing, in this case, means abandon­ing tra­di­tional meth­ods of think­ing around farm­ing and al­low­ing ex­perts who un­der­stand the sci­ence of farm­ing to handle your ag­ri­cul­tural needs. Sun­belt farm went through a very dif­fi­cult time where they were mak­ing losses and Sad­ique con­tac­ted us to nav­ig­ate their chal­lenges,” says Ian Mutua a Cropnuts ag­ro­nom­ist.

To­wards the end of 2016, Sad­ique’s farm just like ma­jor­ity of maize farm­ers in Kenya was at­tacked by the fall army­worms that made him real­ize a big dip in the pro­duce of that year. Later on, in 2017 Sad­ique de­cided to look for ex­pert help to mit­ig­ate the prob­lem at hand.

 “Cropnuts came in and showed us what we were doing wrong and they helped us cor­rect it. Some of the chal­lenges we faced were, low plant pop­u­la­tion, weed pres­sure, pests, fungal dis­ease, wrong tim­ing of farm activ­it­ies and poor crop nu­tri­tion. With all these chal­lenges, the farm only man­aged to har­vest six bags per acre in 2016. In 2017 however, the story was dif­fer­ent and they re­cor­ded a tre­mend­ous in­crease to 32 bags per acre in the har­vest and con­tinue to do so,” said.

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Ac­cord­ing to Sad­ique, the Cropnuts ag­ro­nom­ist vis­its the farm at least twice a week to see the pro­gress of his crops. “Once you seek for Cropnuts ad­vice they carry out routine soil tests, ni­tro­gen fer­til­izer re­com­mend­a­tions, soil health­care pro­gram, and soil life test throughout a farm­ers con­tact with them.”

“In Cropnuts, we’ve really got someone to sup­port us whenever we got emer­ging crop is­sues that need ur­gent Ag­ro­nomic as­sist­ance,” says Babuh.

The in­volve­ment by Cropnuts led the farm to har­vest 32 bags per acre from six bags per acre. As Sad­ique ad­mits, tak­ing up mod­ern meth­ods of farm­ing through ex­pert ad­vice is how to reap max­imum be­ne­fits and profits from your farm.