1y ago

Farmers in Africa say their soil is dying and chemical fertilizers are in part to blame

When Benson Wanjala started farming in his western Kenya village two and a half decades ago, his 10-acre farm could produce a bountiful harvest of 200 bags of maize. That has dwindled to 30. He says his once fertile soil has become a nearly lifeless field that no longer earns him a living.

Like many other farmers, he blames acidifying fertilizers pushed in Kenya and other African countries in recent years. He said he started using the fertilizers to boost his yield and it worked — until it didn’t. Kenya’s government first introduced a fertilizer subsidy in 2008, making chemical fertilizers more accessible for smaller-scale farmers.

Problems with soil health are growing as the African continent struggles to feed itself. Africa has 65% of the world’s remaining uncultivated arable land but has spent about $60 billion annually to import food, according to the African Development Bank. The spending is estimated to jump to $110 billion by 2025 due to increased demand and changing consumption habits.

“Inorganic fertilizers were never meant to be the foundation of crop production,” he said, later adding that because of “commercially inclined farming, our soils are now poor, acidic, and low in biomass resources, and without life!”

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When Benson Wanjala started farming in his western Kenya village two and a half decades ago, his 10-acre farm could produce a bountiful harvest of 200 bags of maize. That has dwindled to 30.
Step 1 might be to not plant the same crop on the same land for two and a half decades straight.
- Years ago I went to Kenya and Tanzania to asses some fields for trials of new cultivars my group was developing. There were a lot of issues with people seeing a yearly decrease in crop yield. But the major issue was actually the lack of crop rotation causing a buildup of disease in the soil which was weakening the plants each year.
  I don't know this guy or his field. And, not carefully fertilizing fields can cause root burn for sure. But poor agricultural yield in Africa is definitely impacted by poor crop rotation.
  
  Wasn't farming invented in Africa? Or at least the nearby Middle East. This has been a known issue for years.
  I bet it's an issue with farmers needing money now, because of low crop prices. Crop prices are cyclical, so hopefully it works itself out without too much economic damage.
- The sort of work that is succeeding in parts of Africa, Pakistan, and India is setting up what they call food forests. Put some fruiting tree species in the center and surround throughout with fruiting and vegetable producing plants. This will form a more complex web of creatures that can live together and produce food for the people who take care of them. No fertilizers, no irrigation--just crops that are appropriate for the region. They can take years to get going, though, which is the hard part. Once they are going, it's just a question of tending to them.
  
  You also can't really mechanise that, so forget about sending the kids to the city for high school. And it's pretty much guarenteed you need to fertilise at least a bit to get the same yield, just by conservation of mass of P and N, assuming you're harvesting from it.
  Contrary to popular opinion, farming is not simple or easy, and there's actual reasons monoculture at scale is so popular.
- They fucked something up, even if it's not that. You'll notice the soils of the US midwest are good as gold after a near-century of this shit.
  That's not really their fault, though. Presumably nobody came and explained the best practices.
  
  No the soils in the Midwest are not good.
  https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7e1766e613384ea59aef9ff17ccbdc9c
  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0341816224002716?via%3Dihub
  Erosion and soil profile degradation from poor farming practices are a huge issue.
This is what happened in North Korea. The widespread use of fertilizers to keep fields producing instead of leaving the soil to rest for a season or rotate crops to revitalize the earth caused the soil to become inhospitable to plants. That's the crux of the NK famine that started in the 90s.
Africa has history to learn from. Let's hope there is change.
- No it's not what happened to North Korea at all. I have no clue where you got that from.
  The collapse of the Soviet Union cutting off food, fuel, fertilizer, and technology support started it.
  Then torrential rainfall and flooding destroyed that years crop and food storage in the main production regions. It also destroyed many of their hydroelectric dams and irrigation systems. Without support from the soviets they had no way to repair them.
  However the main reason hundreds of thousands of not millions died was because of the governments unwillingness to open their borders for international aide/trade. The government deliberately starved their population.
  
  I got it from here, but then followed it up with some googling of NK agriculture and recipes. NK farms push soil too far, use industrial farming methods at the expense of local wisdom, and have no respect for nature - causing them to look like frail idiots who can't sustain themselves without imports.
This sounds like a government program with good intentions but no actual understanding of what needed to be done.
First off both organic and conventional farming methods do acidify the soil. Contrary to what these farmers think organic/traditional farming does it much more rapidly.
Higher rainfall zones also naturally have more acidic soils. Traditionally cultures have temporarily overcome this by burning the vegetation (slash and burn).
If 70% of the soil in the country is acidic the government program should have been to subsidize lime application and soil testing first. Lime is much cheaper than fertilizer anyways and balancing out the pH makes all nutrients more available.
They could have then subsidized the appropriate usage of fertilizer based upon the test results. Blindly applying any type of fertilizer is a recipe for disaster. Fertilizers must be applied in balance for the crop, soil type, pH, and the nutrients.
Couldn't he just amend it with lime? I'm no farmer, but I know about that.
Soil with proper nutrients is also being depleted all over the world due to overfarming and monocolture farming.
What no one wants to accept is too many people on too little land. The earth is barely holding on.
The soil is on it's deathbed and we got a feeding tube keeping it going. Sure it will keep going. But at what cost.
- Does "grapes of wrath" mean anything to you?
  
  Not really, no. I have heard people mention it.
  I think some children have read it in school as guided learning. But it doesn't seem to have much value because people never seem to have gained any knowledge from the book that they mention so I see no reason to read it. No argument or fact is ever generated from people reading the book and bring it up.
  Largely I come across is when people mentioned they have read it and have some knowledge how to be critical of it as parroted by some education curriculum. But is seems more of a English project like when I read Shakespeare and was asked what the author meant, rather than something based on science or economics with ideas and knowledge to be learnt.

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