Food!

After previous years of drought, and the need for food aid, we've been fortunate in Karatu this year to receive good rainfall. We work with Farmer Field Schools (FFS) which are groups of women and men farmers who experiment with improved farming techniques, usually on a plot of land allocated by the community, and then take lessons learned back to their own "shambas" (farms). With the application of Conservation Agriculture methods, this year's crops are looking good, and we look forward to a successful harvest of maize, beans and pigeon peas.

We've been promoting local drought-resistant crops like cassava, which has multiple uses. The tubers can be dried, milled and the flour used to prepare ugali, the staple porridge, and the nutritious green leaves can be consumed fresh or boiled, and dried and saved for future consumption. Sweet potatoes are a nutritious food that can be boiled and consumed directly. Lab lab is a cover crop planted to increase nitrogen and conserve moisture in the soil. The seeds are a good source of protein, and once the leaves have dried they are fed to the farmers' dairy goats.

We're also helping farmers improve their local storage facilities so that the harvest can be conserved for future consumption and the surplus safely stored to sell at a time when the best price can be obtained. This is particularly important now with the negative impact on Karatu of rising global food prices.

Papaya is a particularly good food for boosting the immune system. We work a lot with PLHIV (people living with HIV), and keeping nutrition levels up is a challenge. We've been raising papaya seedlings in our tree nursery and distributing them to farmers. They've proved to be very popular. Access to papaya will really make a difference in terms of improved nutrition and also income-generation.