Word: seeding
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...towered sugar-cane thick with broad crisp blades, here the plants are skinny and stunted, draped with yellow-tinged leaves. The contrast is deliberate, an advertisement for the wares Odiambo sells from his roadside supply shop in western Kenya. While the shopkeeper's robust plots were planted with commercial seed and carefully nurtured with inorganic fertilizer, his sickly specimens are the result of seeds sown in the bare ground. "We wanted to have a control plot, to show the difference," he says...
...Africa, AGRA is funding scientists working on new seed strains, bankrolling the breeders who produce them, and helping wholesalers expand their inventory. Most importantly it's enlisting locals like Odiambo as free-market agriculture extension officers, training them in the proper use of seeds and chemical fertilizers. "The farmer will leave the shop with the product, and also the knowledge of how to use it," says Esborne Baraza, who coordinates AGRA's efforts in western Kenya...
...model is the village of Sauri, a short walk from Odiambo's shop, where seed and fertilizer supplied by Columbia University's Millennium Promise has allowed farmers to reclaim soils that were depleted or weed-infested, expanding cultivated land by 50% and quadrupling maize production. Growers who struggled to feed their families now enjoy surpluses. Within three years, most could afford to buy the inputs themselves...
...what would be successful in the Ethiopian highlands or the Congolese tropics. Rather than try to impose a transition to large-scale, industrialized agriculture, AGRA is providing small-scale farmers with a variety of products for use in traditional planting. The idea, says Joe DeVries, director of AGRA's seed program, isn't to supplant existing practices, but to supplement them. (See pictures of Ethiopia's harvest of hunger...
Despite a bittersweet ending to the season, Suen acknowledged tremendous progress for a group that claimed the top seed at regionals this year after failing to even qualify...