Soghum and Sweet Potatoes

My email address says it all, citykid. I am a citykid and I love it. I walk everywhere, grab a piece of pizza next door, drop the cleaning down the street, or skip out for milk at the end of the street. The best I do in the growing department is on the roof and that’s with a good deal of help from Elise.

Knowing about cash crops was never part of my upbringing, unless you consider new sales at Nieman’s a cash crop. Somewhere, though, between the country club and my adult life, I did learn about soy and tobacco and corn. All the outings with my father to steel mills, farms, the stock yards and the jails paid off and I actually do understand crop rotation and replenishing the land.

This morning when I checked in with the Nation, I saw the usual dread headlines about lack of rain and crop failure, but I also read that they are encouraging farmers to go back to the crops of old. The list of sorghum, sweet potatoes and cowpeas surprised me. All are much higher in nutrients than the maize we feed the children. They were grown on plantations back here for centuries in the kitchen gardens of the slaves. So why now, are they turning back to the tried and true crops? Because they work!
Why should you, dear reader, care about this? Because you are probably American, white, progressive and care about our environment. Because you probably care a bit about Africa and maybe don’t truly realize the rape of the native people of Africa. It has always been apparent to me that when colonialism finished its run the greatest damage done was to take away the people’s belief in themselves. I wonder what would happen if the World Bank and UNICEF and others actually asked the people what would grow best in certain environs instead of giving them fertilizer and assuming that maize is the best answer. Would there be more food, could we tolerate the idea that they know better than all our Agri-scientists do?

I remember visiting a remarkable woman in the outskirts of Kisumu named Mama Florence. She ran a home for women and orphans. She culled the wisdom of the ages of medicine people and grew and used herbs for all kinds of treatment. Her porridge indeed stopped the wasting of children stricken with AIDS. When the election crisis hit last year, she was without food and so far from help that she feared her “family” would starve. They interviewed her on T.V., but like all of the Western World the news moved on and she was forgotten. It saddens me to think of so much knowledge lost or ignored because it’s not chic. It angers me that academics sitting in universities get more credence for their knowledge of farming than farmers who have learned from their ancestors and the soil how to treat the land. And I pray that when we begin our income generating projects next month we will do a better job of listening and sharing both our knowledge and theirs so that we grow what is best for the land and best for the children.
(And if you got this far in your reading the photo is of sorghum )
And now for the article in the Nation:


* Sh7.5m agriculture project is aimed at fighting recurrent hunger in Malindi
Following the failure of rains over the past three planting seasons that has resulted in a serious food shortage in Malindi District, farmers are being encouraged to return to the traditional crops they abandoned in favour of maize.
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As the number of people in need of relief food has risen from 45,000 a few months ago to more than 200,000 today, the district agricultural officer said the Ministry of Agriculture would underwrite a Sh7.5 million pilot project involving 1,000 subsistence farmers in the district.
Mr Babu Musa told farmers and journalists at Kilimani Location that the plan was to provide seeds, help with mechanisation and improve access roads.
Mr Musa said the project fell under the National Accelerated Agricultural Input Access programme and was aimed at enhancing food production.
“Each of the 1,000 farmers will receive seeds and two bags of fertiliser which they have to invest in an acre,” Mr Musa said.
“The fertiliser is for both planting and top dressing.”
He said the project targeted vulnerable and group farmers who will be required to build seed reservoirs in an exercise called “bulking of planting materials” for them to supply other farmers in future.
The so-called “orphan” crops like millet, sorghum, cassava, sweet potatoes, green grams and cow-peas will receive fresh funding.
Access roads
“They resist drought and mature faster and can greatly erase the threat of famine the country faces today,” he said.
Farmers at the meeting said they were happy to return to the traditional crops that required far less water than maize
The initiative recently received a boost when area MP Gideon Mung’aro commissioned a Sh25 million earthmover and a tractor, both of which were bought with Constituency Development Fund cash.
The earthmover will be used to improve the access roads to enable the farmers take their crops to market in the town, while the tractor will be hired by the growers at subsidised rates to plough their fields.
Mr Musa said the project comes on the heels of another in the area, Piga Njaa Marufuku Kenya (Kick Hunger out of Kenya), in which several groups of farmers have received funds to the tune of Sh2.3 million.