Machinery

: 24 August 2018; Hits: 6366

Kisumu to build seven digital weather stations to help farmers in crop production

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Kisumu County government is set to build seven modern automatic weather stations that are poised to help farmers in planning when to plant and harvest hence improving their yields.

The project which is expected to cost Sh35m was commissioned three days ago at Ayueyo village where one such station costing Sh5m was started.

“With the weather stations in place, it will be easier for farmers to predict when to cultivate cash crops such as potatoes, rice, maize in real time,” said Paul Oloo, the county’s director of meteorological services.

“Information from weather stations will be used for research to optimise crop irrigation patterns, pest control models and ultimately improve the quality of crops.”

Monitoring soil moisture and temperature and maintaining these parameters at the correct levels is crucial for cash crops that have short harvest cycles.

Data on temperature and wind speed, he added, would also help determine the right time to spray pesticides.

“The weather station will help individual farmers to determine whether a particular region is ideal to grow a specific crop depending on soil texture,” said Mathews Owili, Kisumu County deputy governor.

Farmers will also be warned in advance about adverse weather conditions such as hail storms and excessive or deficient rains.

The new weather station has a data logger component that will relay information to farmers, fishermen and line county officials simultaneously.

It will provide temperature, wind speed and direction, humidity, soil conditions, rainfall quantities and other variables every five minutes to a 15km radius.

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: 22 August 2018; Hits: 6554

Kenya Breweries Limited introduces a mobile app to manage sorghum production by contracted farmers

white sorghum

Kenya Breweries Limited (KBL) has rolled out a mobile application to accurately track the sorghum grown by the company’s over 30,000 farmers contracted to grow the Senator Keg raw material.

KBL Managing Director Jane Karuku said the Farmforce app will be used to track out-growers, eliminate paperwork and enable the brewer to receive reports from the field in real time.

“The technology will enable us to scientifically track the sorghum grown by our contracted farmers and ensure that we are only receiving grain from those on our records,” Karuku.

KBL will also be able to keep a record of the farmers’ details including their contacts, location and acreage planted and also monitor the performance of the crop using field maps enabled by the app.

The mobile-based cloud solution has been developed by Syngenta Foundation to help smallholders gain access to formal markets and improve the effectiveness of out-grower schemes.

“We will now be able to track the grain from the times of planting because we will be able to estimate, with a high degree of certainty, the harvest we expect from each farmer,” adds Karuku.

The solution will provide some key advantages including automated data collection and analysis, elimination of paperwork and associated errors, automated reporting for effective management, simplification of government audits and effective communication with farmers.

“It also means that we shall have the capacity to ensure that we are only taking in sorghum from our contracted farmers. In the future we hope to use this system to track crops in transit and make payments as well.”

All the field extension staff officers have been issued with mobile phones with the solution for field data collection.

Globally, digital produce-tracking is becoming a standard business practice for food processing companies and other manufactures who depend on farmers for their raw materials.

In the western region, Kenya Breweries is working with 15,000 farmers from Migori, Homabay, Kisumu, Siaya and Busia, who will supply the Kisumu Brewery valued atKsh.15 billion, with white sorghum for the production of Senator Keg beer.

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: 06 August 2018; Hits: 10426

New app connects farmers to tractors

Smallholder farmers in Kenya and Africa at large can now plant their crops 40 times faster by using the hello tractor app that connects farmers to tractors.

According to Alliance for Science, an organization that seeks to promote access to scientific innovation as a means for enhancing food security, Africa has eight tractors per 100km2 of arable land compared to the global average of 200 tractors.

The hello tractor app was developed by agricultural economist Jehiel Oliver from the United States of America who left his job as an investment banker to focus on boosting agricultural outputs for small scale farmers in Africa.

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hello tractor

An owner of a tractor for instance can increase his/her income by downloading the app from Google playstore, and then install a monitoring device on the tractor.

For farmers, the app enables them to text a booking agent who schedules and dispatches a nearby tractor to till, transport, harvest or otherwise take care of his plot and others nearby that also need care.

The tractor can handle up to 30 small plots. Hello Tractor connects and maps small farms, collects data on what’s growing where, can deliver fertilizer and other necessities, and even indicates when a tractor needs maintenance.

In this, one tractor can create up to four jobs including technicians, operators and booking agents.

According to the latest data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, the number of wheeled tractors registered in the country increased from 2,478 units in 2016 to 2,703 units in 2017.

Kenya’s real gross value added in the agricultural sector grew at a decelerated rate of 1.6 per cent from Sh879.6bn in 2016 to Sh893.3bn in 2017. This was occasioned by drought, pests and disease incidence which resulted in reduced crop and livestock production. Maize production declined from 37.8m bags in 2016 to 35.4m bags in 2017 according to the Economic Survey 2018.

Tea and coffee production decreased by 7.0 per cent and 11.5 per cent to 439.8 thousand tonnes and 40.8 thousand tonnes, respectively in 2017. A reduction in cane production resulted in sugarcane deliveries to factories reducing drastically from 7.2m tonnes in 2016 to 4.8m tonnes in 2017.

The volume of horticultural exports increased by 16.4 per cent from 261.2 thousand tonnes in 2016 to 304.1 thousand tonnes in 2017. The volume of marketed milk decreased by 17.4 per cent from 648.2m litres in 2016 to 535.7m litres in 2017.

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