Training Farmers on seed potatoes production at Egerton University .
Training Farmers on seed potatoes production at Egerton University .
My name is Enock Rugut. I am a second-year masters student at Egerton University located in Njoro, Kenya, where I am working on a degree in plant breeding.
I am working on clean potato seed production under the Community Action Research Project (CARP) under the supervision of Professor Anthony Kibe, the principal investigator. My research project thus involves different activities – including planning, land preparation, acquisition of inputs and management of harvest to post-harvest handling.
The other activities include seed multiplication at the greenhouse level using technologies such as hydroponics and aeroponics. We also use in vitro techniques to multiply seeds in the laboratory.
The other major undertaking is putting up modern storage structures and, here, I am involved in all aspects, from costing to planning and actual construction. Most important, however, is training farmers to follow good agricultural practices. This happens at the university farm or through farm visits since the university is in an agriculturally endowed area.
DLS a simple, effective technique
One of the things we are introducing and teaching farmers about is the diffuse light store (DLS) concept involving low-cost storage technology. It is simple and involves storing seed potatoes in layers of trays or shelves in natural indirect light, ensuring adequate ventilation.
It is easy to construct a DLS with locally available materials like wood, mud and plastics. The reason for storing seed potato in a DLS include encouraging stronger, coloured and firm sprouts of potato tuber, avoiding weight loss and quality loss of the seed potato, and allowing time for lot inspection and labelling into classes.
There are three main basic elements in the DLK: light, ventilation, and protection. The light should be indirect, but sufficient to ensure short, firm and coloured sprouts. Long, white sprouts cause easy and fast shrinkage of the tuber. In DLS, tubers are arranged in layers of up to about 7.5cm to ensure that each tuber receives sufficient diffused light.
Ventilation is the most important factor in the store to ensure efficient and sufficient airflow to maintain the temperature and relative humidity for the tubers to breathe and respire. A lot of heat encourages weak sprouts. To manage ventilation or temperature regulation, the walls are spaced at least 7.5cm apart to allow air circulation.
- Until a few years ago, Kenyan potato farmer Richard Mbaria used to harvest just four tonnes of the crop from an acre of land thanks to poor quality seeds, combined with an attack on the crop by pests and diseases.
According to Anthony Kibe, principal investigator of a potato community action research project led by Uganda-based Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture, Kenya's average potato yield per hectare has the potential to
increase to three times that amount with the use of disease-free seeds.
Since its inception in 2017, the forum's project in Kenya, one of 11 across Africa, has benefited approximately 5,000 smallholders. It provides farmers with quality seeds through a process known as tissue culture, which is the cultivation of plant tissues or organs in a laboratory or controlled environment on specially formulated nutrient solutions.
"Tissue culture is an excellent technique for rapid propagation of seed potato, providing high yielding disease-free planting materials," Kibe says.
Tissue culture generates plantlets, also known as apical root cuttings, and mini tubers (tiny potato seeds) that are clean and disease-free, according to Kibe, who adds that the technology accelerates material multiplication to facilitate distribution and large-scale planting.
Tissue culture technology is used in East Africa to produce disease-free and high-yielding fruits and vegetables, including bananas.
However, because of the costs and complexity of the technique, it is primarily used by large commercial farms, seed companies, and government research institutions for potatoes, adds Kibe, an associate professor of agronomy in Egerton University's crops, horticulture, and soils department.
This means that certified seeds are relatively expensive and out of reach of the estimated 800,000 smallholder farmers engaged in potato farming in Kenya.
As a result, only around four to five per cent of seed potato planted in Kenya are certified, according to the International Potato Center, a member of the Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers.
"This is in contrast to leading global producers like the Netherlands... where 99 percent of farmers use certified seeds," Kibe explains.
He claims that despite its contribution to fighting hunger, potato is a low priority food crop in Kenya's agricultural research system, with maize, Kenya's main staple crop, receiving 78% of food crop research.
Richard Mbaria, who owns a four-acre farm in Nakuru County's Elburgon area, in the heart of Kenya's potato-producing highlands, says that access to potato seeds for smallholders like himself is difficult because commercial farms often sell in bulk.
"A farmer buying tissue culture seed potato would spend between three to six times more what they spend to plant conventional certified seeds,” Mbaria says. “This in turn favours large-scale farmers, leaving smallholders with their low-yielding seeds selected from the previous harvest.”
But Mbaria touts the benefits of apical cuttings. He tells SciDev.Net that 100 apical cuttings can produce as much as 100 kilograms of seed potato on average.
Kibe agrees, adding that new varieties produced by the technology have led to yields as high as 30 tonnes per hectare compared with up to ten tonnes per hectare for conventional seeds.
Mike Cherutich, a potato expert at the Agriculture Development Corporation’s seed potato centre, Molo in Nakuru, Kenya, says that although seed potato produced from tissue culture technology tends to be more expensive than traditionally certified tubers, the new technology ensures that the material planted is free of virus and other major disease such as bacterial wilt.
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Until three years ago, Kenyan potato farmer Richard Mbaria used to harvest a mere four tonnes of his crop from his land because of poor quality seeds, pests and diseases.
The middle-aged Mbaria would select seeds from his previous harvest by picking the smallest tubers that would not fetch good prices in the market, and then preserve them for the planting season, despite the disappointing yields from this approach.
He saw nothing wrong with this practice, as followed by most of the smallholder farmers in his village of Kapsita in Elburgon, Nakuru County, in Kenya’s Rift Valley region and beyond. Many of them can rarely afford certified seed or are unaware of the importance of using approved seeds.
But that was then. Today, Mbaria harvests an average of eight, up to 8.5 tonnes of potatoes per acre (0.404ha) and targets 10 tonnes to 12.5 tonnes soon.
The father of four did not transform his farming by some miracle. He has been trained, not only in better management of his crops, but also on selection and preservation of healthy planting seeds, which he is now selling to local farmers.
He is a beneficiary of training and advice offered through a project by Kenya’s Egerton University called Enhancing Access to High Quality Seed Potato for Improved Productivity and Income of Smallholder Farmers in Nakuru County, implemented under the Community Action Research Programme (CARP+).
The programme is one of the activities funded under the Transforming African Agricultural Universities to meaningfully contribute to Africa’s growth and development (TAGDev) initiative by the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture, or RUFORUM, in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation.
Learning at all levels
The aims of the seed potato project include educating farmers to plant only quality seeds, to properly test their soil and to effectively manage diseases and pests for increased productivity, and to organise them in marketing cooperatives for increased income, says Professor Anthony Kibe, the potato project’s principal investigator.
“About 10 years ago, the average yield for potatoes per hectare in Kenya was 22.5 tonnes. Today, it has dropped to around seven tonnes a hectare due to, among others, transmission of diseases through seeds. We are also asking farmers to take up improved varieties,” Kibe adds.
“One way of addressing the problem is by training a number of farmers to become producers of disease-free seeds for sale to their colleagues for increased yields and higher income,” he says.
Sadly, he notes, only 2% of Kenyan farmers who grow potatoes use certified seeds, a situation that hugely compromises yields.
So far, 3,800 farmers have been trained directly at Egerton through field days and small grower groups. In addition, some 12,000 others have benefited from the knowledge through outreach programmes and via the National Potato Magazine that regularly carries stories about the project.
Besides the farmers, the project aims to train at least 10 postgraduate students, including eight masters and two PhD students. Five of the masters students have graduated and two are close to completing, Kibe says.
In addition, 230 undergraduate students have gained from practical lessons as part of the project, with the aim of teaching them how to practically apply knowledge learned in the classroom. At the same time, some 70 staff members have participated in farmer extension and field activities.
“Learning happens at all levels, including at the farmer level. We want to get learners to be able to appreciate knowledge from farmers,” Kibe says.
One of the aims of the project is to develop a potato variety suitable for drier areas with less rainfall. Research into such a variety is led by Judith Natabona, a PhD student in plant breeding and a regional manager with the Agricultural Development Corporation (ADC).
Natabona says the variety is now undergoing field trials to test its suitability and tolerance for heat and drought and could revolutionise Kenyan agriculture if it succeeds.
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The CaWSA- Centre showcases various water conservation, storage, abstraction and distribution systems and soil and moisture conservation technologies, innovations and management practices (TIMPS).
Prof. Anthony M. Kibe,
CaWSA – Centre Coordinator
Crops, Horticulture and Soils Department, Egerton
University, Njoro, Kenya.
Email: akibe@egerton.ac.ke,
+254721402957