By Kimuri Mwangi
Highlighting the benefits of Conservation Agriculture (CA), bringing onboard the private sector, harmonizing policies and expanding markets have been touted as some of the initiatives needed to ensure that more people adopted conservation agriculture. Participants at the Kenya National Conservation Agriculture Symposium held in Nairobi on Wednesday, 12th March, agreed that since there was proof that conservation agriculture works to the benefit of farmers, there was need to scale it up to ensure more farmers reaped the benefits from the adoption of the CA technologies, inputs, practices and services.
The symposium was hosted by the African Conservation Tillage Network, Conservation Agriculture Hub Kenya, and the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development.
Dr. Boaz Waswa, a soil expert at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT who is also the Chairman of the Conservation Agriculture Kenya Hub, said the aim was to bring together various organisations that work on conservation agriculture in Kenya to ensure they approached matters (CA) reading from the same page.
“Conservation agriculture is not a new practice. In essence, when you look at the practices that are adopted or considered part of conservation agriculture, they are the things that we do regularly. But what is lacking at the moment is the consistency with which we do those things in a bundled way, and looking at the outcomes. If we look at the history of conservation agriculture, it dates back into the early 80s, when various programmes tried to bring these practices together as a bundle. When we look at our country, our adoption is quite low. We have approximately 30,000 farmers who are practising conservation agriculture. This could be old statistics, but it just tells us that we are very few farmers, approximately 1% of farmers practising real conservation agriculture,” opined Dr Waswa.
He added that the target of the partnership is to see how they can increase the number of farmers practising conservation agriculture from as low as 30,000 to 1 million farmers over the next five years, into 2030 and make it a habit and a practice of what people do daily.
Various strategies that can be used to raise the numbers of farmers adopting CA were discussed, among them being the coordination of efforts to upscale CA by various stakeholders. The network is therefore bringing together all these actors to come together, to learn together, share good experiences, and bring out the cases so that many other farmers out there can learn and adopt.
Dr. Waswa opined that the other thing is to make sure that there is learning by doing, encouraging more practice and learning of these technologies in the various regions through demonstrations, farmer awareness sessions, media communication, and making sure that this information is out there. He insisted that now is the time to emphasise the benefits of conservation agriculture, not necessarily the practices themselves. “We need to look at the benefits that come with conservation agriculture. If it is productivity, let us look and say, how can conservation agriculture help us to increase productivity? How can conservation agriculture help us to improve water storage in the soil, so that this water can be used even when there is drought and the yield is stable? How can conservation agriculture help us to conserve more biodiversity and healthier soils, and we can see the benefits associated with healthy soils.”
He also pointed out that mechanization is a key component of conservation agriculture and there is a need to know how to create mechanization service providers who will enable the targeting of smallholder farmers, medium-scale farmers, and large-scale farmers so that this mechanization can come in to support the CA activities in different regions.
The CA Kenya Hub Chair said they are also looking at coordinating various policy issues so that this is mainstreamed within the policy of the country, so that we have it at county level and at the national level where we are integrating the sustainable farming practices, conservation agriculture being one of them.
Eng. David Njogu, the Chief Engineer in charge of Mechanization at the State Department of Crops in the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development, observed that CA is one of the pillars of addressing soil fertility in addition to others.
Representing the Principal Secretary, State Department of Crops in the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development, Dr. Paul Kipronoh Ronoh, Eng. Njogu said that the government took the initiative seriously by holding a National Conservation Agriculture Conference in 2019, where they met various stakeholders.
“Together, we looked at what was needed, we got a lot of input, and we continued doing the research. I’m happy to report that in 2023, we were able to bring all that discussion into a policy document, which we now call the Soil Fertility Policy of the Republic of Kenya. And so, the government is actually at the forefront in spearheading soil fertility, whereby conservation agriculture is one of the aspects that will be able to address this. And for this symposium again, we have done it in collaboration with all the stakeholders who are present here. And we are happy to see that our participation is so high,” said Eng. Njogu.
He added that from the remarks from the farmers present in the symposium, one could tell that CA is picking up and it is profitable, and what is needed now was to upscale what has been witnessed.
Eng. Saidi Mkomwa, the Executive Secretary/CEO of the African Conservation Tillage Network (ACT) gave some statistics that showed that more needed to be done to increase adopters of CA.
“In the world, we have about 200 million hectares under CA, but in Africa, we only have 3.4 million hectares. And cascading to Kenya, we only have 30,000 hectares. But in terms of percentages, worldwide, we have 15% of the cropped area under CA. In Africa, it is 3.3% while in Kenya, it’s less than 1% of the farmed,” he said.
According to Eng. Mkomwa, conservation agriculture “has not been mainstreamed and has not been accepted by the policy makers as the technology that has the potential to transform agriculture,” something that needs to be looked into.
“Secondly, the benefits of the technology have not percolated to the people who invest in agriculture. And the people who invest in agriculture, besides the small order farmers and the large-scale farmers, are mainly the bigger investors, those in business, like those who have conservation agriculture equipment.
He added that Conservation agriculture inputs manufacturers have not yet seen the opportunity, or they have not appreciated the demand for conservation agriculture inputs, saying we need to create the demand for conservation agriculture by demonstrating that it works. Over the years, Eng Mkomwa said that not-for-profit organisations, together with the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), have demonstrated that the CA technology works, providing the proof of concept. The remaining challenges faced by farmers, he added, cannot be solved by the not-for-profit organisations but by bringing on board other key stakeholders.
“We need to bring on board the people who are manufacturing machinery, so that when we say in conservation agriculture you don’t plough, farmers should know where to get the no-till equipment. When we are saying you can produce more with conservation agriculture, farmers should know where they will sell the surplus produce. Because if they produce and they cannot sell, they will be discouraged. So we have done a lot of technology push and now it’s the time to bring on board the private sector, off-takers, processors, aggregators, to see how they can support farmers to produce more profitably, so that it becomes a win-win for them to get more produce that is produced cheaply, which means more money for the farmers. The private sector needs to see that there’s a business opportunity for them to pull the technology,” quipped Eng. Mkomwa.
On the role played by Governments to support CA, Eng. Mkomwa said that governments are pressured with so many things, and while they would have a desire to give support, they need the proof that what is being mentioned really works, particularly when it’s something new and something transformative like conservation agriculture.
“Because all over, people were taught in school how to plough and how to harrow. All of a sudden, we are telling them, stop, no more ploughing, no more harrowing, as there is a better technology. So, governments need the scientific evidence, and we have some. We might need more, but there is enough of it for governments to provide the needed support through policy support and so on,” he opined.
