Conservation Agriculture in Progress

By Sara:

I was recently out visiting the places where our Ugandan partner organizations are doing their agricultural programs to see what the farmers are doing "in the field".  Here are a few pictures and stories so you can also see what is happening.

In Kaberamaido, one farmer has just planted mucuna and lablab, two green manure/cover crops (gm/ccs), with his maize.  Mucuna, especially, is a very fast-growing vine, so it cannot be planted until the maize is relatively large, otherwise it will tear down the maize plants.  But these two gm/ccs will help to improve the soil in this farmer's garden and will add nutrients back that were lost to the maize plants.

 We also visited a lady who is very proud of her giant tomato plants.

She attributes their growth to the mulch and the jackbean (shown below), another gm/cc, which she put around the tomato plants.

Then, in Amuria, farmers are planting mucuna and jackbean alone to improve their soil so that they can plant another crop there next season and get better yield due to the better quality soil.

There are also some demonstrations started where the lead farmers are comparing mulched and un-mulched maize and beans.

Some farmers are also intercropping maize and beans (specifically rice bean, in the case below) to help improve the soil and keep the soil under the maize cooler and more moist.

By far the best garden we saw, though, was in Katakwi.  Salome went home from the KIDO conservation agriculture training and immediately planted a demonstration garden at home, comparing mulched and un-mulched maize and beans.  You can see her standing in the part that was mulched in the photo below.

And then the difference between the mulched (on your left) and un-mulched (on your right) sections of the garden.

The lead farmers, like Salome, trained groups of other farmers on what they had learned about conservation agriculture.  But some of their neighbors saw what was going on and are trying it themselves, without even being taught!  In the picture below, you can see a garden where a farmer who was not in one of the participating groups is trying a comparison of mulch and no mulch in a section of garden.

Here are some of the lead farmers who are training and encouraging their groups in conservation agriculture: