Cool Conservation Agriculture Successes

 By Sara:

Again, you heard some about this from Geoff, but he and I went to do a visit to monitor the progress some of the farmers in Katakwi are making who are doing conservation agriculture with our Ugandan partner development organization KIDO.  This is also a time for advising and encouraging the field officer who works directly with the farmers.

In the picture below, you can see one of the gardens that the lady in the pink shirt started to compare mulching and no mulching.  You can see that the maize on the left side is very small - that one is not mulched.  The maize on the right is mulched.  Salome, the woman on the right, is the resource person for this group and she helped her group members start small gardens like this to do comparisons of different techniques.

Salome also has intercropped maize with jackbean, a gm/cc.  We will wait to see how this benefits the maize and the soil, as time goes on.

KIDO is also working with the farmers to start kitchen gardens where they can grow vegetables right next to the home to improve nutrition and health.  I think this newly prepared garden below is the most beautiful one I have ever seen:

The same farmer showed us his mulched maize which is about ready to harvest.  He pointed out how, strangely, the maize is very short, but the cobs are quite big.  (The unmulched maize did not produce anything.)  The shortness of the maize may have been a blessing in disguise anyway, since there was a recent heavy rain and most peoples' maize got blown down, but his was too short to fall over.

I have wondered, sometimes, about whether farmers would really want to go to the trouble of mulching anything other than high-value crops in their gardens, since collecting the mulch can be a lot of work.  Of course, not everyone will do so, but for this lady below and the members of her farmers' group, when I asked whether they would mulch something like maize or beans, the answer was an emphatic "yes!"   She said that getting mulch is much less work than weeding and also that she has seen that she will get some harvest of mulched maize and beans, but nothing from the ones that were not mulched.  This is the same demonstration that I showed before, where they had tons of weeds in the unmulched part and no weeds at all in the part that was mulched.  Well, they weeded it and then there was no rain for a few weeks.  The maize and beans with no mulch have almost shriveled up completely and will yield nothing, while the mulched maize and beans are doing just fine.  This, I think, is a great example of how conservation agriculture helps to protect crops when weather is not optimal.

Here is another one of those kitchen gardens.  This woman just transplanted tomatoes into it, so she covered them with leaves to protect them from the sun.  She dug a hole in the middle, with a trench leading into it and then circular trenches going out from the center.  The garden is in a place where water runs off from around her house, so the trenches catch the water and put it to good use, watering her vegetables, rather than being lost.