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Bringing fertilizer into Tanzania: registration, ports and reach
An importer evaluating a new fertilizer supplier is not really assessing the fertilizer. They are assessing whether it can be registered, whether it arrives on time, whether the documentation survives inspection, and whether they can move it once it lands. The...
Planting an Avocado Orchard in Tanzania: Getting the First Three Years Right
Tanzania is planting avocado at a pace few countries have attempted. More than 1.7 million subsidised seedlings are being distributed, thousands of farmers and hundreds of extension officers are being trained, and collection centres are going up across the producing...
Tea grows well on soil that ruins maize: feeding Kenyan tea bushes
The acidity that stunts maize in Kericho and Nandi is the same acidity tea wants. A tea bush is happiest around pH 4.5 to 5.5, roughly where a maize crop starts failing. So a smallholder with tea on one side of the road and maize on the other is farming two crops with...
Seven weeks to get it right: French bean nutrition for European buyers
A French bean crop is in the ground about seven to nine weeks. That is the whole window. If the nutrition is wrong in week two you find out in week six, when pods come off soft or curved and there is no time left to fix it. Kenya supplies a large share of Europe's...
How to check that fertilizer is genuine: a buyer’s guide for Kenya
Counterfeit and substandard fertilizer has been a documented problem in the Kenyan market. Bags have reached farmers containing sand and inert filler, regulators have confirmed substandard product in circulation, and consignments have been impounded. Most fertilizer...
A thousand flowers, a handful of mangoes: fixing fruit set in Ghana
Stand under a mango tree in the Ghanaian transition zone at flowering and it is covered in panicles carrying hundreds of flowers each. A mature tree flowers by the thousand and might carry a few hundred fruit to harvest. That conversion rate decides a grower's income,...
The soil is running a deficit: maize, rice and soybean in northern Ghana
Every harvest takes nutrients off the farm. Grain leaves in a truck, residues get burned or grazed, and almost nothing goes back. Nutrient balance studies for Ghanaian crops show a deficit for nearly all of them. Do that for twenty years around Tamale and the result...
One Formula for Every Farm: Why Blanket Cocoa Fertilizer Misses Most of Ghana
Here is a finding that should be better known than it is. When researchers mapped the nutrient requirements of Ghana's cocoa soils against the blanket fertilizer formula recommended nationally, the formula matched only about six percent of the land actually growing...
Pineapple for Europe: Feeding Ghana’s Year-Round Supply Advantage
Ghana sells pineapple into Europe on a promise most origins cannot make: fruit every week of the year. Mangoes and pineapples together carry roughly two thirds of the country's horticultural export value, and buyers in the EU and UK pay for continuity as much as for...