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    Dry­land Seed Lim­ited to aid Kitui farm­ers in­crease green grams yields to 900 kgs

     N26 Green Grams Variety.jpg

    The N26 green gram vari­ety.

    A farmer from Ka­siokoni area in Kitui is hop­ing to in­crease his green gram yields from 500kgs per sea­son to 900kgs thanks to the N26 green gram vari­ety de­veloped by Dry­land Seed Lim­ited (DSL) to adapt to dry cli­matic con­di­tions.

    John Nzau, who owns a one and half acres farm, has been plant­ing un­cer­ti­fied seeds lead­ing to low yields. He is one of the farm­ers who last year be­nefited from the Kenya Red Cross (KRCS) agency and the county gov­ern­ment part­ner­ship where the two parties launched Ndengu Re­volu­tion food se­cur­ity pro­ject tar­get­ing 200,000 small holder farm­ers in Kitui County.

    RE­LATED STORY: More than 6,000 farm­ers be­ne­fit from free green grams seeds in Kitui

    “I am sure that the new seeds that can with­stand our harsh weather con­di­tions will lead to the in­crease of my yields by March and April, the plant­ing sea­son when we ex­pect rain­fall,” said Nzau.

    “I have been plant­ing seeds I bought from a friend which I keep on re­plant­ing every sea­son and the pro­duce have been de­creas­ing with time.”

    The N26 vari­ety ma­tures within 60-65 days after plant­ing and is tol­er­ant to harsh cli­matic con­di­tions such as Kitui’s hot semi-arid con­di­tion with an­nual rain­fall ran­ging between 300mm-1050 mm.

    Ac­cord­ing to the county gov­ern­ment, ndengu re­volu­tion is ap­pro­pri­ated for the re­gion be­cause it  has the best soils for grow­ing the crop which does not re­quire a lot of rain­fall.

    RE­LATED STORY: Green grams sprout in arid Mak­ueni

    To­wards the end of last year KRCS is­sued 200 tonnes of cer­ti­fied green gram seeds worth Sh50 mil­lion to the farmers.​This was part of the agree­ment where the county gov­ern­ment paid Sh250 for each farmer while KRCS topped up the bal­ance of the other Sh250 for 2kg of the seeds which costs Sh500.

    The county gov­ern­ment ex­pects in­crease in pro­duc­tion and cash in the coounty. A kilo of N26 green gram seeds can yield 90kg which can fur­ther pro­duce 36m kilo­grams and when sold at Sh100 per kilo­gram gives a total of Sh36b in one sea­son.

    To fur­ther help farm­ers like Nzau, the hu­man­it­arian agency has set aside Sh500m to buy the pro­duce which is loc­ally known as ndengu in Kiswahili from local farm­ers to shield them from ex­ploit­a­tion by un­scru­pu­lous middle­men.

    RE­LATED STORY: Green grams and ground­nuts re­tail­ing highest across Kenyan mar­kets

    Ac­cord­ing to KRCS’s sec­ret­ary gen­eral, Ab­bass Gul­let, there is high de­mand for Kenyan green grams in Asian coun­tries, in­clud­ing India, China, Japan, Saudi Ar­a­bia, and Pakistan among oth­ers.

    “Deal­ing with brokers who mostly come from Nairobi has been a prob­lem. They dic­tated the price of our pro­duce after mak­ing us feel des­per­ate thus selling just to avoid miss­ing the mar­ket,” said Nzau.

    “It is en­cour­aging that our county gov­ern­ment will also as­sist us ac­cess ag­ri­cul­tural ex­ten­sion ser­vices and tech­nical ad­vice from ag­ri­cul­tural ex­perts, up­ping yields.”

     

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