When Benson Wanjala started farming in his western Kenya village two and a half decades ago, his 10-acre farm could produce a bountiful harvest of 200 bags of maize. That has dwindled to 30. He says his once fertile soil has become a nearly lifeless field that no longer earns him a living.
Like many other farmers, he blames acidifying fertilizers pushed in Kenya and other African countries in recent years. He said he started using the fertilizers to boost his yield and it worked — until it didn’t. Kenya’s government first introduced a fertilizer subsidy in 2008, making chemical fertilizers more accessible for smaller-scale farmers.
Problems with soil health are growing as the African continent struggles to feed itself. Africa has 65% of the world’s remaining uncultivated arable land but has spent about $60 billion annually to import food, according to the African Development Bank. The spending is estimated to jump to $110 billion by 2025 due to increased demand and changing consumption habits.
“Inorganic fertilizers were never meant to be the foundation of crop production,” he said, later adding that because of “commercially inclined farming, our soils are now poor, acidic, and low in biomass resources, and without life!”
When Benson Wanjala started farming in his western Kenya village two and a half decades ago, his 10-acre farm could produce a bountiful harvest of 200 bags of maize. That has dwindled to 30.
Step 1 might be to not plant the same crop on the same land for two and a half decades straight.
Years ago I went to Kenya and Tanzania to asses some fields for trials of new cultivars my group was developing. There were a lot of issues with people seeing a yearly decrease in crop yield. But the major issue was actually the lack of crop rotation causing a buildup of disease in the soil which was weakening the plants each year.
I don’t know this guy or his field. And, not carefully fertilizing fields can cause root burn for sure. But poor agricultural yield in Africa is definitely impacted by poor crop rotation.
Wasn’t farming invented in Africa? Or at least the nearby Middle East. This has been a known issue for years.
I bet it’s an issue with farmers needing money now, because of low crop prices. Crop prices are cyclical, so hopefully it works itself out without too much economic damage.
Soccer was invented in England. How’s that going for them?
It would have been developed by humans all around the world at the same time. Technology and knowledge weren’t the limiting factor–humans have always known that you can toss some seeds in the soil and a plant will come out. What was lacking was the climate–the last ice age ended about 12,000 years ago and only after that was massive cultivation possible. It was after that where you see settlements and eventually cities appear.
It’s more complex than this, but it’s related to climatic change.
First, we’re still in the ice age. We’re just in an interglacial period.
During the glaciation, humans mainly hunted a few big game. It was an inhospitable environment.
When the glaciation ended, the climate became more stable, warmer, more clement. Rivers rised and became calmer, as the sea level rose.
Humans started diversifying and broadening what they ate. They collected much more plants, hunted more animal species, notably small game, fished much more. It was the mesolithic.
In zones that were particularly abundant in resources, probably at the edges of ecozones, it became possible and interesting to settle down somewhat, and defend this territory against outsiders. Owning resources allowed to invest time and labor into making things more productive. Domestication was part of that.
Not all regions are suitable, or have sufficient domesticable species. Some places took much longer than others to really get farming going, and most never did, until domesticates arrived there from somewhere else.
Hmm, it seemed to be a problem with subsistence crops too. We were working on black rot resistance in sukuma wiki which isn’t a cash crop. We were working on resistance specifically because it reduced the need to rotate crops. People could grow it more continuously without risking yield loss.
Methinks it’s a capitalist issue, not a farming issue.
Farmers can’t bank seeds and have to buy new every year or face legal consequences.
Probably also planting based on value of crop vs cost of growing not nutritional red of the community.
It’s not an “ism” issue. This has happened in countries that were completely anti-capitalist. It’s just a biological imperative: you have to rotate crops, regardless of who runs your country.
The Soviet Union and the PRC demanded quantities of cash crops for export too. If your choice is rotating crops or staying out of the gulag, you’re not going to rotate.
Anti-capitalist maybe, but pro capital. Dear leader and his cronies need the cash crops to for export, fancy houses don’t grow on trees. They grow off the the sweat of the worker.
I didn’t intend to say the farmer is making the choices solely for personal profit. They grow what sells, or what they’re told to, so they can afford to live, not their choice.
In the end I see we agree. It’s not about an ism. It’s all about cash. Money. Capital. And greed doesn’t care about crop rotation- it’s too short sighted.
The sort of work that is succeeding in parts of Africa, Pakistan, and India is setting up what they call food forests. Put some fruiting tree species in the center and surround throughout with fruiting and vegetable producing plants. This will form a more complex web of creatures that can live together and produce food for the people who take care of them. No fertilizers, no irrigation–just crops that are appropriate for the region. They can take years to get going, though, which is the hard part. Once they are going, it’s just a question of tending to them.
You also can’t really mechanise that, so forget about sending the kids to the city for high school. And it’s pretty much guarenteed you need to fertilise at least a bit to get the same yield, just by conservation of mass of P and N, assuming you’re harvesting from it.
Contrary to popular opinion, farming is not simple or easy, and there’s actual reasons monoculture at scale is so popular.
This isn’t about trying to integrate with modern life. It’s realizing that aspects of modernity are obscene and some things should go back to how they were done millennia back.
Bro, how many cobs have you husked by hand? What about cotton balls carded, spun and woven? Grain reaped? I haven’t done much of those things, but enough to get that it sucks. And that’s not even going into the various things all those educated people in the the city make possible, like medicine so you don’t die at 5 from a bacterial infection.
Assuming you’re in the US, why do you think illegal immigrants are the ones that work the fields? Unless you’re about to reveal you’re a rural Indian this is some seriously out of touch Marie Antoinette shit.
I think they meant like around population centers to supplant regular food. But I don’t know where that would actually be…
My crazy idea is Suburbia has a lot of lawn, and my dad showed me a garden can feed a family more than I would have thought. But who has time to do that? So you nake a law that you forfeit sections of your land, not x feet near your house if they have no existing agricultural or industrial activity for open planting, until at least the next season. Maintained lawns wouldn’t exist unless you were somewhere sufficiently rural.
Hopefully, otherwise they’re telling the starving African kids to go back to the stone age to save the environment, while they presumably stay somewhere air conditioned. The sad thing is that they probably don’t even realise how insulting that is.
Densifying suburbs is a huge thing that needs to happen. It won’t change the world, because as big as suburbia is rural areas are bigger, but it will help. It also would do a lot to keep transport emissions down.
This is what I am talking about. You can restore desolate land and make it produce food for humans:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vKAPL_WfBA&t=47s&pp=ygUPYW5kcmV3IG1pbGxpc29u
It’s unclear why you are projecting some nonsense about me wanting to keep Africans in the stone age. Maybe try to be a bit more charitable.
A terrible idea, putting food production in communities and making sure they are fed. I should have known better. You’re right, massive agriculture in the hands of a powerful elite is the only answer.
They fucked something up, even if it’s not that. You’ll notice the soils of the US midwest are good as gold after a near-century of this shit.
That’s not really their fault, though. Presumably nobody came and explained the best practices.
No the soils in the Midwest are not good.
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7e1766e613384ea59aef9ff17ccbdc9c
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0341816224002716?via%3Dihub
Erosion and soil profile degradation from poor farming practices are a huge issue.
If you want to get “out into the weeds”, yes there’s still problems. Water usage is insanely unsustainable in some areas too, which is the real emergency. Until the water table dries up yields are continue to be great.
Looking at the first paper:
Results show that topsoil has declined by a rate of 2 mm per year over the past 150 years
So that’s the timescale we’re talking. The Kenyan policy started in 2008, so 2mm/year topsoil loss isn’t the issue. I also wonder how this figure changed around the dustbowl period, when practices were much worse yet.
To prevent the future impacts of this unsustainable erosion, farmers can implement no-till practices such as using disc seeders or agricultural drills. Along with this, soil regenerative practices may be necessary to reduce erosion rates (Thaler, Kwang, Quirk, Quarrier, & Larsen, 2022). Many of these practices are already common and are currently used by 51 percent of soybean, cotton, corn, and wheat farmers in the United States (Gamillo, 2022). Despite this, there are political, social, and economic barriers to this issue (Thaler, Kwang, Quirk, Quarrier, & Larsen, 2022). Providing incentives around no-till farming is essential for reducing soil erosion. No-till farming is necessary for soil productivity, ecosystem services, and long-term sustainability (Thaler, Kwang, Quirk, Quarrier, & Larsen, 2022).
Fun fact, no-till uses even more chemicals. If you’re not mechanically digging up weeds and pests you’ve got to kill them other ways.
This is what happened in North Korea. The widespread use of fertilizers to keep fields producing instead of leaving the soil to rest for a season or rotate crops to revitalize the earth caused the soil to become inhospitable to plants. That’s the crux of the NK famine that started in the 90s.
Africa has history to learn from. Let’s hope there is change.
No it’s not what happened to North Korea at all. I have no clue where you got that from.
The collapse of the Soviet Union cutting off food, fuel, fertilizer, and technology support started it.
Then torrential rainfall and flooding destroyed that years crop and food storage in the main production regions. It also destroyed many of their hydroelectric dams and irrigation systems. Without support from the soviets they had no way to repair them.
However the main reason hundreds of thousands of not millions died was because of the governments unwillingness to open their borders for international aide/trade. The government deliberately starved their population.
I got it from here, but then followed it up with some googling of NK agriculture and recipes. NK farms push soil too far, use industrial farming methods at the expense of local wisdom, and have no respect for nature - causing them to look like frail idiots who can’t sustain themselves without imports.
This sounds like a government program with good intentions but no actual understanding of what needed to be done.
First off both organic and conventional farming methods do acidify the soil. Contrary to what these farmers think organic/traditional farming does it much more rapidly.
Higher rainfall zones also naturally have more acidic soils. Traditionally cultures have temporarily overcome this by burning the vegetation (slash and burn).
If 70% of the soil in the country is acidic the government program should have been to subsidize lime application and soil testing first. Lime is much cheaper than fertilizer anyways and balancing out the pH makes all nutrients more available.
They could have then subsidized the appropriate usage of fertilizer based upon the test results. Blindly applying any type of fertilizer is a recipe for disaster. Fertilizers must be applied in balance for the crop, soil type, pH, and the nutrients.
Couldn’t he just amend it with lime? I’m no farmer, but I know about that.
Soil with proper nutrients is also being depleted all over the world due to overfarming and monocolture farming.
Please drink a verification can.
