Even in agriculture families rock!

Donkey milk please!!

Donkeys carry water containers in Kenya. ©The Brooke

There is a saying in Swahili Asante ya punda ni mateke...(The thanks of a donkey are his kicks)

As such there has often been a perception that the donkey is a very ungrateful creature. 

For this reason the donkey has been branded a beast of burden the world over suffering several acts of cruelty as they transport different farm and household goods.

A  recommendation  by the  Food and  Agriculture  organization that donkey  milk  be  used  to  counteract the global demand  of  cow  milk and other dairy products  is  certain to make  donkey  owners  more  kind   to  their  animals.

The UN food  agency  late  last year recommended more usage of  milk  from  a variety of animals including  camels, llamas and  donkeys  due to the increasing  high milk prices  especially in the world.

Apart from goat, sheep  and buffalos that  are  currently being kept in  different parts  of the world  for  provision of milk Fao recommends  that the  Alpaca, Moose, Reindeer and Yaks can also be  milked.

A camel herder milks one of his camels in Oman Photo: ALAMY

Rapid urbanization in  Africa and  the  growing  middle class  means that  more  people are  having an increase in their  disposable income  and as a  result  can a afford a change of lifestyle eating more  diary and  meat  products.

Fao predicts  that  by  2025 diary consumption in  developing  countries  will grow by  25  per  cent  because  of   population growth and rising incomes and  cow milk  which most people are currently  dependent on will not be  sufficient to  supple  the  most  vulnerable households.

Consumption of camel milk has been growing Ethiopia, Mali and Somalia and the trend is quickly picking up in Kenya. 

With their milk being fronted as more nutritious and healthy. Though it is not for the fainthearted, you will have a thoroughly cleansed stomach before your intestines get used to the milk.

Making a quick buck: A woman selling donkey milk to slum dwellers in Vijayawada. — PHOTO: V.RAJU

Its popularity has vastly spread that it is not common for one to order camel milk tea of the menu in a restaurant in Nairobi. Am guessing though in the next five years we will be doing the same for donkeys?

Building better breeds the community way in Ethiopia

Livestock is considered one of the main contributors to the GDP of African countries and as such their health and productivity are of great importance.

Livestock farmers are constantly looking for higher quality breeds whose increased productivity equals greater financial returns.

While crop farmers are more open to higher yielding varieties introduced by research institutions, animal keepers are less accommodative to such ‘lab breeds’.

More often than not farmers tend to borrow from one another the fattened bull or ram for a week in order to service their females

It is no wonder that the community based breeding programs introduced in some rural communities in Ethiopia have begun yielding tremendous results.

Picture courtesy Charlie Pye-Smith/ILRI

The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU), and partners from the National Agricultural Research System are implementing breeding programs in Bonga, Horro and Menz with three different sheep breeds.

The project is aimed at improving the productivity of the sheep and increasing the incomes for the 360 households.

Initially the superior variety of rams  were identified  from among the  farmers  and which could be  exchanged in order  to breed  more value  animals.

The animals identified by local community members are then exchanged by farmers within a cooperative based on an agreed upon model.

The committee checks at the conformation, color, horn type, tail type and other criteria in decision making.

 If a farmer with a prized ram wishes the cooperative is at liberty to purchase it in order to continue sharing the valued traits.

More  details of  the project can be gotten here or download the breeding productivity report

Mobile app provides forecasts for Rwandan coffee farmers

Technology is great! It helps you do stuff you never thought you would be able to and in quite a short time. 

In the sphere of agriculture technology has helped improve the quality of seeds and enable farmers easily access extension services and increase their productivity.

Rwandan coffee  farmers are  set to  get  a boost  in the  fight  against  coffee rust with the  creation of a mobile app created  by a startup incubated at  ESA in the  UK.

The  app  will enable the   coffee  farmers  protect and improve their  crops  by providing  highly localized weather  forecasts helping them make  the best  decisions at the right time.

The hyper local forecasts can alert farmers to   changes in rain patterns and any disease threat. 

The weather safe coffee farmer edition app can run on multiple mobile software like Apple ios, Android and Blackberry.

For more information

 https://www.innovateuk.org/-/hackathon-success-for-weathersafe

http://phys.org/news/2014-03-mobile-app-weather-rwandan-coffee.html

 

How does index based insurance work?

Index-based livestock insurance is slowly gaining popularity in North Eastern Kenya mainly because of the unpredictable weather, which decimates their livestock.

Andrew Mude, a programme officer with the International Livestock Research Institute, says insuring livestock and assessing the value of  damage during severe drought may not be profitable for conventional insurers.

 “It is difficult and costly for assessors to come to the arid and semi-arid areas to establish the cause of death for animals,” he said

Index insurance, therefore, insures the pastoralists against conditions that lead to stock losses.

 “The key nutritional input for livestock is forage and there is a very big correlation between the availability of forage and health of livestock,” he explained.

 “The more limited the forage, the more likely the animals will die.” 

 To assess the scarcity of  forage,  Ilri uses various sensors, like those owned by Nasa, European Union and the  other research  satellites to tell the level of photosynthesis activity. 

 

The high resolution sensors normally cover areas of 250 metres by 250 metres, taking photos of the vegetation in a particular area every 10 days.
 

When the research began in  2008, Ilri  was using satellite images covering eight square kilometres, which, over the years, they have  scaled down to improve the accuracy of their  predictions.

The data collected on the availability of grass and vegetation is measured against data on livestock death from both the arid lands management programme and the World Bank.

A model with a precise relationship between forage availability and livestock death is formed, leading to the formation of an index-based insurance cover for a particular area.

Images of the devastation the severe drought of 2011 had on livestock in the Horn of Africa PHOTO: OXFAM

If the trigger level is reached in a particular area, the insurance company compensates the affected pastoralist, regardless of livestock loss.

“The more the index is above the trigger levels the higher the payout, which enables them to buy feeds for the livestock and compensates them against any loss they may have incurred,” he said.


 Apart from insuring livestock, the indexing can be used to insure crops like maize and wheat in areas where farmers  rely on them for their livelihood but productivity is affected by adverse weather.

Statistics from FAO report on GMo traces

This slideshow was first published on the Business Daily website

 

Fears as GM traces in convetional foods grow

The United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has, in a new report, raised the alarm over the increased cases of genetic contamination in globally traded foods.

The survey conducted in 193 countries between February and June last year showed that more conventional foods were being found to have genetic modification (GM) contamination.

The report comes at a time when Kenya is considering maize importation to plug a deficit following poor production last year.

With traditional white maize import sources facing challenges of their own it is expected that Kenya’s imports will be sourced elsewhere.

According to the FAO report the increase in contamination has impacted global import and export trade, especially for countries with zero tolerance to genetically modified foods.

FAO reported that over the period of the survey, 25 countries across the globe blocked imports after finding traces of GMOs.

Incidences of discovery of genetically modified material in non-GM food, the report says, has been on the increase for the last 12 years, with  cases more than doubling in the last five years.

Between 2002 and 2009, 60 cases of contamination were reported among the surveyed countries compared to the 138 cases reported up to last year.

The island of Madagascar destroyed a consignment of maize it had imported from France after it was found to have traces of GM contamination.

Last year the Namibian Agronomic Board (NAB) reprimanded individuals deemed to be responsible for producing and marketing maize products that allegedly contained GM in a consignment imported from neighbouring Tanzania.

The report noted that while the number of cases of contaminated consignments was relatively smaller than the total amount of food and feed traded globally on any day, the increased occurrence is a worry as it leads to costly trade disruptions.

In most cases the genetically modified crop is authorised for use and sale in one country but may not be legalised in the importing country. If traces of GM are found in a non-GM consignment, the shipment may be destroyed or returned to the country of origin.

Levels of contamination in human food and animal feed varied from one country to another, with a general range between detection of low levels of GM crops that have been approved after a food safety assessment to the adventitious presence level where unintentional presence of GM crops that has not been approved on a food safety assessment in any country was discovered.

FAO said that trace amounts of GMO could be mixed with non-GM food and feed crops by accident during field production or during processing, packing, storage and transportation when the two interact.

The FAO report also identified the inadequate separation between commercialised and field trial production areas as a major contributor to the resulting trade risks.

The fact that different GMO policies exist between trading partners also raised the possibility of imports being rejected over contamination.

Botswana, Congo, Cape Verde, DR Congo, Madagascar, Mozambique and the Gambia were among African countries included in the survey.

Others were Mali, Morocco, Somalia, Namibia, Sudan, Niger, Seychelles and Togo.

Linseed, rice, maize, rice cracker and noodles were the most common contaminated foods, with the traded papaya, pet food, canola and soybean products also showing some levels of GM contamination.

Most of the shipments found to have low levels of contamination came from the US, Canada and China. The increased incidence of reported contaminated consignments has been attributed to the increased production of genetically modified crops around the globe.

The International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA) estimates that the total acreage of biotech crops increased by five million hectares from 2012 to reach 175 million hectares in 2013.

In their global status of commercialised GM crops 2013, ISAAA noted that of the 27 countries that had grown genetically modified crops, 19 were developing countries that planted an acreage that exceeded that of the industrial nations.

The leading growers of genetically modified crops last year were the US, Brazil, Argentina, India and Canada.

ISAAA also identified soybean, cotton, maize and canola as the major biotech crops planted last year.

Seventy nine per cent of global planting, equivalent to 84.5 million hectares of GM soybean, was grown in 11 countries while 23.9 million hectares of genetically modified cotton was grown in 15 countries last year, representing 70 per cent of global planting.

About 57.4 million hectares of maize, considered a staple food in several African countries, planted last year was genetically modified representing 32 per cent of global planting while 8.2 million hectares of GM canola was grown in four countries in 2013.

Tanzanian farmers get taste of mobile extension services

Extension services in Tanzania are set to go mobile thanks to a Norwegian funded program at the Sokoine University of Agriculture.


The new system will help farmers access the vital market information as well as pass on information on various technologies to use to improve farm productivity.


The system will enable the little number of extension workers to reach as many farmers as possible.
According to reports from Tanzania the Enhancing Pro-poor Innovations in Natural Resources and Agricultural Value-chains (Epinav) Program is currently being tested in Kilolo in Iringa and Kilosa districts in Morogoro region.


Kenya’s well developed technology sector has enabled many individual and organizations to come up with both web based and mobile platforms that help farmers and other players within the agricultural sector value chain.


If technology is integrated well with agriculture has the potential to increase productivity and the socio-economic status of many smallholder farmers in the continent.