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Table grapes in Nashik: nutrition that has to survive an audit
Nashik accounts for the large majority of India's table grape exports, and the season is short. Shipping runs from late December into April, with the best fruit moving in February and March. What makes grape different from every other crop a distributor stocks is that...
The nutrient India’s soil tests keep flagging
Two national programmes have measured micronutrients in Indian soils using different methods and different sample sizes. ICAR's coordinated project analysed about 243,000 samples across 615 districts. The Soil Health Card programme analysed more than 30 million. They...
Before You Build a Cold Room: Vegetable Nutrition for Tanzania’s Horticulture Boom
Horticulture has quietly become Tanzania's biggest agricultural export earner, bringing in around 569 million US dollars in 2024, ahead of tobacco and cashew, and aiming at two billion by 2030. The bottleneck now is not growing the crop. It is getting it to a buyer in...
Ghana’s fertilizer market opened up: where a distributor can win
For years the biggest question in Ghana's fertilizer trade was what the government would tender for. Ministry procurement moved large volumes under the subsidy programme, COCOBOD procured separately for cocoa, and a few large suppliers handled most of what reached...
Making a subsidised bag go further: maize and sunflower in Tanzania
No Tanzanian smallholder walks past subsidised urea. When a bag that cost around 131,000 shillings comes down closer to 70,000, that is what most farmers buy, and arguing otherwise wastes everyone's time. The useful question is why a bag that should transform a maize...
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...