With drought-resistant maize varieties improving harvests, farmers are now taking on another enemy - the borers that eat stored grain
MACHAKOS, Kenya (AlertNet) – Philip Makau appears to have won his battle against drought. Now he has one more enemy to take on.
For a decade, the 62-year-old farmer from the village of Kasinga, 30 minutes’ drive from the town of Machakos in southeastern Kenya, struggled to grow enough crops to support his ailing wife and his four sons.
But recently Makau has been growing varieties of maize that can thrive despite the increasingly limited rainfall in this region of the country, which receives little more than 90 cm (35 inches) of rain annually. The dry conditions, experts believe, are related to climatic shifts that have brought prolonged drought to parts of Kenya.
A four-year-old collaboration between a Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) Katumani centre in Machakos and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) has helped hundreds of farmers like Makau adopt drought-resistant varieties of maize, giving them an unprecedented level of food security.
“For the first time, my three-quarters of an acre (0.3 hectare) farm produced five bags of maize,” Makau said. “Before that I could not manage even a half bag.” A bag contains 90 kg (200 lbs) of grain.
Now he is confronting his second enemy – the large grain borer, and other insects that eat his improving harvest once it is put in silos and stored.
Villagers quip that the voracious borer is so dangerous that once it is done with the stored grain it may well go for the farmer as well.
Traditional maize storage containers, woven from twigs and plastered with cow dung, are no match for the larger grain borer, which literally mills the grain to powder, according to Makau.
“Within three months there is nothing left in the store,” said Makau. Even reusing plastic drums as maize containers gives no protection.
“The pest is so tough that it even eats plastic,” he said.
METAL SILOS
In response, CIMMYT researchers began introducing farmers to metal grain silos in 2008. Tadele Tefera, who leads the organization’s project on post-harvest adaptation technology, said that silos can almost completely eliminate losses of harvested grain.
The grain borer can’t penetrate the silo’s metal walls, and because the silo is airtight, it kills pests that may slip in along with the grain, Tefera said. The technology already has been adopted successfully in El Salvador and Guatemala, and is now being taken up in Kenya and Malawi in Africa.
In the region around Philip Makau’s home, 400 metal silos have now been erected. The largest can hold 30 bags of maize. Makau’s silo holds up to five bags.
Since silos can be used for up to 20 or 30 years with minimal maintenance costs, a growing number of farmers want to use them, Tefera said.
But cost is an issue. Even the smaller silo at Makau’s home costs 13,000 Kenyan shillings (about $130), making such technology unaffordable for many farmers. Researchers hope to find ways to bring down the cost.
Meanwhile, they are working on another way to solve the problem – developing seed varieties that are resistant to post-harvest pests.
“In the next one or two years we plan to have varieties in the hands of farmers that are able to withstand the storage pests,” said Charles Kariuki, director of the KARI Katumani centre.
However, Kariuki said that the institution is struggling to find the resources needed to meet the rising demand for new farm technologies.
According to Wilson Songa, Kenya’s secretary for agriculture, the government has allocated 74 million shillings ($740,000) to KARI this year for research and innovation, which represents just 1.3 percent of the national budget for developing rural agriculture.
Lloyd Le Page, chief executive officer of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, said the challenges facing Makau are not unique to Kenya.
“Farmers in all arable lands of the world need to optimise production not only for their own food security but also as a tremendous option to generate additional income,” he said.
David Njagi is an environmental writer based in Nairobi.
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