Nuru’s Agriculture Program provisions small loans of agricultural inputs (fertilizers and seed) to farmers and trains farmers to generate a permanent and significant increase in crop yields.  The beginning of the long rains season (December to July) marks the busiest time for the agriculture program and for millions of Kenyan farmers who are investing in their future.  In the 2011-2012 season Nuru is helping some 3,000 farm families to produce enough maize for their food security and income generation on one to three acre plots throughout Kuria, Kenya.

In the November Ag blog, we learned about farmer empowerment through base education – an event from which over 3,000 farmers graduated (with 2,000 of these farmers brand new to Nuru).  At base education, farmers learn the basic theoretical tenets of Nuru.  Afterwards, farmers attend a series of practical and timely technical trainings, beginning with ground preparation, pacing, planting, and gapping.  These farm management basics, plus the essential farm input loans, take farmers from yields of three bags of maize per acre to fifteen and twenty sacks of maize per acre.

The technical training series diverges from traditional agriculture extension in ways that help it adapt to the cultural and societal context.  During base education farmer groups were organized by the same members who comprise them.  The group learns farming best practices together, works the land together, and pays the loans together.  This group concept plays off Kenyan culture.

Groups form support networks within the community and draw out community members to serve as trainers and leaders.  The agriculture program staff, themselves farmers from the same rural communities, teach the group chairman, who in turn pass on the knowledge to the members of their groups.  This training of trainers encourages a type of grassroots development as community members learn from their neighbors, who themselves eventually become the next leaders and Nuru staffers.

The agriculture team also employs best management practices such as demonstration-based learning, appropriate language and technology, and close supervision of farm activities following trainings.  While Nuru International supports local and traditional knowledge, the agriculture program teaches modern farming practices based in principles of ease of implementation, proven science, and sustainability (especially for the natural and economic environment).  Importantly, maize agriculture is relatively new in Kuria, Kenya, and has been largely unsuccessful because of lack of agriculture inputs and traditional farming methods.  Nuru promotes a more intensive investment and care for the land and crops, with the aim of eliminating the period during which people go hungry (the hunger season).

Traditionally, ground preparation was not planned for optimal crop establishment.  In some areas, steep or very rocky sites were chosen and cleared, with resulting erosion.  In other areas, there was too much shade or soil was too compact for proper crop development.  Nuru teaches farmers to choose flat, sunny areas with live and dead barriers to prevent soil erosion.  Tillage and composting with animal and green manures are also promoted, and burning is discouraged.  These practices strike the balance between environmental concerns, and proper crop development.

Farmers traditionally used inexact plant spacing and fertilizer amounts, resulting in wasted land and inputs.  During pacing training, farmers learn to measure their land by walking the length and width, each pace having been measured to equal a number of meters.  These measurements are essential to ensure that farmers use the correct plant spacing and fertilization rates on their plots.

The Nuru planting method ensures proper spacing for nutrients and sunlight, freedom from competition from other vegetation, and appropriate development of grains.  Planting training teaches farmers to use the appropriate amount of fertilizer and one maize seed per hole, each hole having been precisely spaced at 25 cm by 75 cm.  This new teaching differs drastically from traditional practice, where farmers would broadcast seeds randomly, or use a stick to poke a hole in the soil and pour in a few seeds (dippling).  The spacing was highly irregular, resulting in a field with patches of overly dense and other overly sparse areas.

Planting practices also did not provide the jump start of fertilizer that maize requires in the highly weathered soils of Kuria, Kenya.  Compounding the problem, two or more maize seeds competed with the same meager supply of nutrients, and farmers, thinking more is better, would let all of them grow with resultant poor production.  The last technical training is gapping, during which farmers learn to replant in any areas where seeds did not germinate correctly.  Nuru teaches planting methods that correct the problems found with traditional crop establishment methods.

Together, the technical training series forms the basis of proper maize production, setting farmers on the path to food security and income generation.

Posted from Suba Kuria, Nyanza, Kenya.

Nuru’s agriculture program mobilizes and trains thousands of farmers every year in October and November in anticipation of the long rains maize harvest season (January to July). The agriculture program issues loans of agricultural inputs (maize seeds and fertilizers) and trains farmers to use them. Nuru equips extremely poor smallholder agriculturalists with the knowledge and tools to sustainably and permanently increase crop yields for subsistence and sale.

Each of Nuru’s program models – agriculture, community economic development (CED), water and sanitation, healthcare, and education – are built on the foundations of sustainability and scalability. Agriculture leads and drives the other Nuru programs.  Farmers become Nuru members through a series of trainings and participation in agriculture loans, thereby increasing their crop yields. At the harvest date, farmers have enough food for subsistence and sale, improving their basic living standards and generating income.

The other Nuru programs follow up on and integrate with the agriculture program to bring a holistic community and household development. For example, the CED Program facilitates farmers to form savings groups so that their extra income is stored safely as cash to be used in case of an emergency or, better yet, for investment in other income generating activities. The healthcare, water and sanitation, and education programs similarly integrate with the agriculture program. The involvement of farmers in other Nuru programs starts with mobilization and agriculture training.

Farmer mobilization and training commences with a general farmer meeting – the first introduction to Nuru – followed by base education and a series of specific technical trainings.

While it would seem that farmer trainings should immediately start in on technical topic areas in agriculture, Nuru has found that farmers should first be trained on a set of principles encapsulated in what is termed “base education” training. The two-day course covers life skills and broader concepts for farmer participation in Nuru programs. Nuru Agriculture equips and trains farmers to increase maize yields; Nuru as a whole aims to empower individuals to lift themselves and their communities out of poverty.

Base education is far from a simple list of procedural rules, but rather through base education farmers come to understand how and why the actions that Nuru promotes will lead them out of extreme poverty. Nuru facilitates farmer empowerment, so that farmers use knowledge and tools to assume an active and responsible role in changing their lives, instead of taking a back seat to poverty alleviation.

Base education achieves its impact of mobilizing and empowering extremely poor farmers through an agenda of five topic areas.

• Service Leadership: Teaches farmers to become advocates that serve their communities as humble stewards of their natural and human resources.  Nuru uses small farmer groups as functional work units who assign their own chairmen, the aspiring local service-minded leaders.
• Tools & Knowledge: Informs farmers of the importance of implements and trainings to achieve goals. Specifically, farmers learn the importance of inputs (seed and fertilizer) and agriculture trainings to achieve the goal of increased crop yields.
• Groups & Hard Work: Encourages farmers to use their neighbors and communities as an interdependent support network that can achieve goals through hard work and effort. Nuru uses groups as a culturally appropriate mechanism because Kenyan society is traditionally collectivist (tuko pamoja – we are together – is a Swahili-language adage popular in Kenya). Groups work together to learn and reinforce agriculture knowledge, labor the land together to plant and weed on time, and repay their loans together.
• Credit & Loans: Informs farmers that agriculture loans from Nuru are not gifts, but rather are meant to be repaid. Nuru uses both positive reinforcement and analysis of consequences to encourage loan repayment – farmers understand that if they do not repay their loan there will not be funds for loan issue to their fellow community members, to their groups, or even for themselves in future years.
• Savings: Farmers learn through role plays and group discussion that planning and saving cash for the future is an important part of their household and community livelihood.

Upon successful graduation from base education training, the participants are inscribed as Nuru members and provided access to small agriculture loans and trainings for maize production on one acre. The loan product offers improved maize seed and quality fertilizers in a timely fashion and at an accessible price. The agriculture technical trainings include everything from land preparation and planting, to weeding and fertilizing, to harvesting and grains processing – all of which are central to achieving increased crop yield.

Nuru issues small loans and imparts technical agriculture skills to thousands of farmers yearly, enabling them to excel at maize farming. Base education, and the life skills and programmatic components it teaches, empowers farmers with the knowledge and tools to sustainably lift themselves out of poverty. Together, technical agriculture skills, high quality agriculture inputs, and base education are the first steps towards the Nuru vision of holistic community development. Tuko pamoja! (We are together!)

Posted from Nyanza, Kenya.

Over the coming months Nuru’s Agriculture Program will evolve in exciting ways to aid the overall mission of increasing crop yields in a sustainable and scalable way.

Nuru International employs local Kenyan staff members to manage the agriculture program and develops their capacity in conjunction with an expatriate staffer (Agriculture Program Manager / Nuru International Fellow). The team works together to sustainably increase crop yields, principally through the issuance of small loans of high quality inputs combined with agricultural extension and training. The agriculture loan product is accessible to smallholder agriculturalists and targets a repayment rate of >98% by farmers. Loan repayment fuels sustainable program growth to meet the needs of the extreme poor in rural areas of southwest Kenya. Over the coming months there will be special attention to innovations such as piloting cash crops, mechanisms to cut costs amidst rapid growth, and information gathering to make smart decisions with a growing staff.

The following are areas of innovation for the agriculture program:

• New Program Manager / Agriculture Fellow: Nuru’s Agriculture Program is receiving its first ever Agriculture Fellow who will assume the program manager role. This transition of Nuru International staff brings fresh ideas, technical expertise and further capacity to facilitate gradual handover of program leadership to Kenyan staff.

• Leadership and decision-making partial transfer to Kenyan staff: The Kenyan staff will assume new responsibilities over the coming months as they develop their capacity to implement and scale programs, inventively engineer solutions to problems, and pilot new elements of the agriculture program. Nuru International promotes a responsible, gradual transition of leadership to Kenyan staff. Nuru aims to achieve a long-term sustainable and scalable impact while maximizing the short-term impact of third party donor funding and expatriate staff.

• Maintain loan repayment rates at 98%: Nuru’s Agriculture Program issues small loans of maize inputs (fertilizers and improved seeds) to smallholder agriculturalists for maize production. The maize produced, even from as little as one acre, is enough to repay the original loan, provide food security to families, and fuel growth of investment capital in extremely poor rural communities in Kenya. A particular focus over the coming months is to raise and maintain loan repayment at 98%; a percentage which sustainably funds the overhead of the agriculture program.

• Scale program to include 1,000 new Nuru farmers: Among Nuru’s program areas, the agriculture component leads the expansion into new areas to reach farmers who desperately need access to quality agricultural inputs and training. Nuru’s Agriculture Program helps feed families and raise incomes, thereby acting as a foundation for the community and allowing other Nuru programs to enter the area.

• Pilot short rains cash crop and research second alternative: Nuru farmers currently cultivate maize with the agriculture program during the long rains season (February to August), yet are often left with little access to inputs to fuel agriculture production during the short rains season (September to January). Nuru’s Agriculture Program is currently researching pilot crops for the 2012 short rains season. Nuru aims to provide Kenyan farmers an alternative to tobacco farming. Growing tabacco is a labor and input intensive farming scheme that often bankrupts farmers, causes respiratory illness and deforestation due to drying shacks, and leaves soils heavily eroded and chemically contaminated.

• Reduce program costs and redesign staffing model: Nuru Kenya is a non-governmental organization that fundamentally focuses on business-like efficiency to provide services – health, sanitation, education, agricultural extension, and economic development – to our customers – the rural extreme poor of Kenya. To achieve this goal, the agriculture program will be reevaluating program costs and restructuring staffing to be more efficient so that every Kenyan shilling invested in agriculture achieves its highest impact in the shambas (farms) of the extreme poor.

• Partner with M&E to generate adequate geographic information to meet strategic and operational needs in a sustainable way: Monitoring and evaluation is critical to generating the base information that Nuru’s Agriculture Program uses to evaluate whether it’s achieving its desired impact with extremely poor rural farmers. Specifically, we will combine participatory needs analyses and geographic information systems (mapping) to generate spatial information using appropriate technologies. Mapping will aid operations in analysis of agricultural and social data to determine if input loans are meeting socioeconomic needs in particular geographic areas of focus.

We look forward to sharing our progress updates in the coming months.

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Matt Lineal is thrilled to join Nuru International as its first agriculture fellow in September 2011. Matt is dedicated to working with smallholder agriculturalists and rural communities as they interface with their natural and socioeconomic environment. Before joining Nuru, Matt worked with The Nature Conservancy and Peace Corps in Honduras, and throughout the U.S. Interior West with the USDA Forest Service. He earned his BA in Government and Spanish from Lawrence University and his MS in Forest Sciences from Colorado State University. Matt has experience in small plot sustainable agriculture, agricultural extension and project development.

Posted from Nyanza, Kenya.