Adventures in Tropical Agriculture

I mentioned that we live on a large grassy compound (please see the first post). In fact it is split into two by a fence and most people only see the upper compound. My back door opens on to the lower compound which was virtually unused, and reverting to bush. Its usable area measures around 45x90 metres, about 1.3 acres . It seemed a waste of good land, particularly as it is fenced, keeping stray cattle, goats and opportunist thieves outside.

The project began last November with the clearing of some bushy weeds. Then ploughing was planned but that meant getting the old tree stumps out. There turned out to be around 60 of them that had to be dug and chopped out, all but a few by Okeny Teberio, a tractor driver, my agricultural consultant and labourer. The tractor eventually ploughed after many delays, but the land was too rutted to plant. An Ox-plough was brought in but the ground was too difficult and they withdrew. So diggers were hired, the human kind, and dug it all over, levelling the deep plough furrows and clearing the weed growth.

The land is near the bottom of a shallow valley, very poorly drained; it is prone to be as hard as concrete in the dry season but waterlogged as soon as the rains start in earnest. What to grow? We settled on rice and sunflower. The sunflower because we hoped to harvest before the heaviest rains and rice because it likes it wet. We hoped to plant both 'Upland' and 'Super' rice but in the end the seed for Super could not be found. In the end we only used an upland rice variety called Narika 4; this rice does not need to grow in a wet paddy field but is happy enough in ordinary farmland. The sunflower variety is DK 40-40, which it is said is best suited to oil production and it is resistant to water-logging. This is what the two (chemical treated) seeds look like with a cm scale:

Planting of the rice, in rows 25cm apart was done in the week of 20^th May. It was hard work for a team made up of deaf and hearing friends, some paid, others volunteers. We started at 7:30 and went on to around 11:30 and then had breakfast together; it is normal practice here not to eat before work. It was all done by hand using hoes and a long piece of string.

Then it was the sunflower in the following week, in rows 75 cm apart (so faster progress) using much the same team. I had mentally divided the area into 3, for sunflower, super and upland. But when the super could not be found we decided to fill the last third with wide spaced sunflower and under-sow with upland rice at the first weeding.

Now, 11 weeks later the rice is showing more ears of grain every day but so far the seed cases are empty. On Monday 5^th Aug, I noticed the first flock of birds on the rice. Hmmm. Maybe they are waiting for the grains to fatten. Scarecrows required?

10 weeks after planting this is the sunflower, with some 'plates' drooping, heavy with seed already. But some have still to form flowers. The heavy rains have caught us before harvest but the plants do not seem to be complaining. Maybe they really are resistant to water-logging!