Smart farms

: 12 June 2020; Hits: 8949

Neem demand triples, but Kenya slow to expand as India and China seize chances

By Brian Moseti

The demand for neem has more than tripled in the last five years, driven by the tree’s myriad medical and pest control, which now looks to include locust control, but while China has planted 22m trees in the last two decades, Kenya is only now awakening to the market opportunity.

During 2020, neem has gained sudden attention for its potential to control locusts. In February, Kenya’s Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries and Cooperative listed neem as one of the botanical insecticides that had shown great promise as an alternative to chemicals in controlling the pest. Already, farmers in Eastern Kenya have had great success in using neem extracts to fight locusts and the Agrochemicals Association of Kenya (AAK) is carrying out studies on the efficacy of the botanical product in locust control.

Additionally, the Pest Control Products Board (PCPB), in its most recent list of pest control products registered for use in Kenya, endorses several neem-based pesticides and insecticides.

Related News: Neem leaves save Nakuru farms from pests

But neem has also found popularity around the world for its role in disease cure and prevention. Several scientific studies, including one titled Therapeutics Role of Azadirachta indica (Neem) and Their Active Constituents in Diseases Prevention and Treatment published in the PubMed journal, show that neem and its ingredients have therapeutical powers. Indian farmers have also traditionally used de-oiled neem cake as a fertilizer and soil additive as well as an active ingredient in shampoos and dog sprays.

The versatility of the tree is making it a valuable commodity globally, with the neem oil/extract market expected to reach an annual value of $1.9bn by 2021, driven by rising demand in North America, Europe, and China.

This will be a three-fold growth since 2015 when the extract market generated revenue worth $653.7m, according to the Global Neem Oil/Neem extract Market 2020 report by Innovate Insights.

However, “the Neem Oil/Neem extract industry is highly competitive, due to a large degree of fragmentation in the market,” said the report.

India produces almost 60 per cent of the neem oil/extracts in the global market with the country’s production of seed kernels, now at 3.5m tonnes a year, yielding over 700,000 tons of oil. China is also a large exporter of neem products have cultivated more than 22 million trees since 1999.

In Kenya, large-scale neem planting has been achieved by the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology’s (ICIPE’s) awareness projects in schools across Suba and neighbouring districts as well as numerous homesteads in western Kenya.

The tree is also cultivated in regions of the Kenyan Coast, like Mwatate in Taita Taveta County, where each homestead has 1-2 trees for domestic medicinal use and often for making sculptures.

However, the tree has not yet been planted on commercial plantations like in India, where cultivation covers tracts of up to 5,000 acres.

Native to India and Burma, neem whose common botanical name as Azadirachta indica is a member of the mahogany family. Neem is revered by Indians as a “village drugstore” owing to its potential to treat a myriad of diseases. The evergreen tree can grow up to a height of 30 metres and survives for 200 -300 years.

Neem is drought resistant and grows well in altitudes of 0-1400m above sea level and in soils ranging from sandy and sandy-clay soils to riverine clay.

It performs exceptionally well in arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs), and with ASALs making up 89 per cent of the land in Kenya, the tree becomes one of the crops that can be grown profitably as it requires little to no management once established.

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: 08 June 2020; Hits: 10108

Coronavirus has stress-tested our food systems, and many are set to fail

By Eric Kimunguyi, CEO, Agrochemical Association of Kenya

Coronavirus has brought enormous setbacks, suffering, and forecasts of a global depression ahead following the closure of so many economies for so long. But if there has been one area where it has exposed our global fragility, that area has been food.

Certainly, the curfews, lockdowns and workplace closures delivered an uptick in power cuts, but there’s no great clamour about our energy infrastructure now being under threat of failure. Likewise, with water, it remains far from accessible to all but has not been plundered by this year’s pandemic. The shelter could take a hit on joblessness and unpaid rents. But the elephant in the room is definitely food.

That hasn’t gone unremarked. At the level of international geopolitics, the World Food Programme has warned us all that we are moving into a famine of what it has called ‘biblical’ proportions, by which, it’s fair to say, the WFP meant ‘humanity threatening’.

That made some headlines. But not too much concern at street level.

Likewise, economists and academics keep muttering darkly in jargon about food supply chain issues and food security. What they mean is, we are going to be short of food: very short of food indeed. In fact, we are going to be more short of food later this year than we have ever been on Planet Earth in any of our lifetimes.

So, with the translations provided on the biblical famine and food supply chain issues, how has this happened, and what can we do to prevent starvation?

Well, the trouble began by locking most of the world into their homes during the planting season, stopping a lot of logistics that were transporting seeds, fertilisers and pest control products, keeping most seasonal workers away from the fields, and additionally messing up the ways food is bought (much of it through restaurants, for instance), resulting in an agricultural throwaway and leaving farmers additionally short of payments to fund replanting, while other stocks were impaired as different food stocks were, conversely, run down.

Across all, the food chain took a row of hits, with far more food thrown away than normal, and far less planted.

In Kenya, our own horticulture, which was feeding Europeans with vegetables, couldn’t get air cargo space and is still being limited by tripled transport charges. We also had excessive rain that reduced our last harvests and the largest locust invasion this century.

There is, nonetheless, some time-lag in the impact of all those problems. Take our bread. Wheat accounts for 28 per cent of the cereals we consume, where maize accounts for 56 per cent. Yet we import nearly all of our wheat to make the bread that is a significant part of our diet. Some 30 per cent of that imported wheat comes from Russia, but Russia isn’t going to suffer a bread shortage of its own sending its wheat to us to keep our bread going. Threatened with running short, it banned its wheat exports on 26^th April until later this year.

Some of its wheat was already on ships in transit to us. But by the third week of May, our commodity importers reported that wheat deliveries due from Russia had not arrived. Some ordered extra from Argentina because Argentina and Russia – being southern and northern hemisphere – have different planting cycles and seasons. But as the disruption feeds through to those who were freshly harvested as well as to those who were due to harvest from now, the number of alternative sources will become fewer.

And without imported wheat, Kenyans simply won’t have any bread. Nor any rice to speak of either.

From the first glimpse of the hunger now ahead, we at the Agrochemical Association of Kenya began communicating through every means possible that #EveryCropCounts this year, urging farmers to plant more, government to subsidise inputs, organisations to support every endeavour to control pests, manage soil, and maximise yields.

But as we face months ahead of unprecedented hunger, encouraging the maximum possible harvests through more planting and higher yields, is but a first step. For what this pandemic has brought home – and this will speak far more plainly to many in weeks and months to come as they cannot buy the food they need – is just how vulnerable our food system is.

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We store little. We add value to little. We lose a lot to low yields and poor pest control, getting sometimes less than a fifth of the possible production from the land we have. Despite having some of the finest agricultural lands in Africa, we import large swathes of our food, and while we talk about sustainable production in the face of climate change, we have paid far less attention to the resilience of our food supplies to all other disruptions.

And yet the lessons are there. In 2017, we lost 70 per cent of our maize to Fall Army Worm at a time when we could import maize from elsewhere. This year, we have fed millions of locusts with food destined for our nation, and now face every kind of possible food shortfall.

Thus, if a single good thing can come from the food challenges we now face, it will be our attention to stocks and storage, to yields and self-sufficiency and value addition, and to how we make food security about protecting ourselves from all the risks we didn’t protect ourselves from in time for the Coronavirus pandemic.

And if we do that, something great will have come from all of this: as the first real stress test on our way-too-fragile food system.

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: 02 June 2020; Hits: 36313

Laikipia farmer switches half acre to Sh200k-a-month mint farming

By Fredrique Achieng’

A visit to Nairobi Agricultural Show, last year, inspired John Mburi of Laikipia County to try a new crop on just ¼ acre of his four-acre farm in November 2019. Within months, his new planting of the herb mint had delivered him over S1m on its first harvest.

For almost a decade, since 2010, John has been farming maize, until he visited the Nairobi show and learnt about herbs that he could easily grow on this farm. The mint, which takes just 90-95 days to mature from the first planting, is now earning him far more than maize that used to take 8 months to each harvest,

“I was growing maize on my four acres of land, but due to poor market performance, I decided to move to herb cultivation. I started mint as my first herb variety. So I planted it on a quarter acre of my land to see how it would turn out,” said John.

After the first 90 days, he was happy with the results. He had found a few traders who were interested in buying the mint from him, and on his first harvest, he was able to produce 5,400Kgs of fresh leaves, which he sold for Sh1,080,000.

This was a strong enough result to encourage him to continue with the crop. Bearing in mind that mint is an invasive crop, it had already spread to almost another quarter acre of his farmland. So he decided to maintain it on the area it had already grown over but now opted to grow it in pots, going forwards, since it helps to stop the roots from spreading.

He transplanted all the existing plants into ceramic clay pots, which help maintain and transfer moisture, and submerged them into the soil.

“The size of the pot is dependent on the number of plants you would want. For me, I used five-litre pots, which each hold around ten plants. The distance between each plant is 8 inches: this way it gives space for the plant to grow well,” he said.

Mint grows easily on its own, even in poor soils, and does not need fertilizer, which is one of the reasons why John chose it.

“The main care that I give it is the constant watering, which I do twice a week: aside from that, the plant is self-sustaining. To keep them moist all through I have placed grass mulch on the area where they have grown,” he said.

A trick John uses to maximize his harvest is trimming of the branches of the plant, which increases their volume per plant, resulting in more leaves for his harvest.

On harvesting, he sells fresh leaves at Sh200 per kilo and dried leaves for Sh250 a kilo. This is the farm-gate price for traders who come to buy the herb directly from him at his farm. His other customers include hotels in the area and his neighbours.

Since the herb has already matured and he has already built a customer base, John is now harvesting around 1,000kgs per month from his half acre, which he sells for around Sh200,000.

It’s a rapid success and has inspired John to investigate venturing into other herbs now, such as rosemary, basil and thyme.

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