Field trips with the Agroforestry Institute in Kitale

This week I have been spending every day at the Swedish- funded 'VI agroforestry Institute'. Their goal is to establish a green belt around Lake Victoria, by having small scale farmers plant indigenous tree species on their homesteads (shambas). They have a large (5 acre) demonstration farm, a good little museum, a seed collection unit, and offices for extension officers, training staff, and monitoring staff. My goal is to learn as much as possible about agroforestry in the two weeks I have to spend with the project. This week I spent mainly on site, but next week I will spend mainly in the field. I did go in the field twice this week... including this monring...

Had a good time with the agroforestry folks today. There were people there from their sister project in Uganda who I hung out with. We went to seven shambas- representing 3 of the 120 special interest groups in this particular division. Each group is comprised of 15-30 members. (there are 6 divisions associated with the VI agroforestry project)

At the first shamba we were greeted by singing and dancing mamas- women ranging in age from 30 to maybe 70. They were so happy to have visitors! The extension officers began dancing too... wowee, it was fun. I was SO impressed by the projects I saw today. I had been to another division earlier in the week which had had VI in the area for only one year, so the effects were not yet noticeable. In this place, called Kiminini, the effects of the project were very visible. On one side of the road was a large scale farm- acres and acres of bare ground covered with left over maize stalks. You could imagine the effects of torrential rains and strong winds on the erosion- in addition to the decrease in soil fertility due to the nutrient- sucking corn crop. On the other side of the road the shambas are all quite small- as small as 0.1 acres... not much if you need to produce enough food for a family with kids. Growing maize on this land would be crazy- for one thing, you would only harvest maybe 16 bags of corn if the season was good. This would only happen once per year as maize takes so long to ripen. This means you would try to support your family on a one-time small cash inflow. As an alternative, these families have started tree seedling nurseries. Tens of thousands of seedlings are produced and sold to bigger farms at a rate of 10-20Ksh each (for comparison, one mango costs 5Ksh). The small shamba plots I saw had a mud house or two on it but were otherwise covered in seedlings. Each nursery is typically a group effort, usually situated by a house with a constant source of water. A group may for instance decide to pool their money to drill a hole and buy a water pump which can be used for the nursery as well as for their own needs. From the money earned by the group, people are able to feed and clothe their children, send them to school, perhaps buy an animal such as a cow (which would in turn give them a more diverse income- now they can sell milk...) or build an addition to their house.

In one case a man was building a completely new, huge house out of bricks. This particular guy was very ingenious- he is an inventor- an engineer- a pioneer for technology. He had developed a clay 'brooder' which is used to raise chicken chicks. I will try to post a picture. It is a large clay box with an open area in the bottom where the chicks or fertilised eggs stay warm. The clay structure gets warm by someone lighting a fire on the top in order to cook food on the stove part of it. The residual heat lasts for quite a while. I saw these brooder stoves in several different sizes on 3 homesteads that we visited. This method of farming chickens is revoloutionary for the average small scale farmer. The shelter means the majority of the chicks survive (instead of letting them run in the elements), and that the hens can continue laying eggs without brooding on the ones that have already been fertilised/ hatched. This man also invented a really cool model of oven/ stove which was wood fired and also purified water by passing it through tubes and boiling it from the heat of the fire.

The other special interest groups in the area include bee keeping, firewood growing, fruit growing, and aquaculture (!). I am really intrigued to see a small scale fish farm in inland Kenya. That will be next week...