Mziza Farmers Ready to Go

Mziza farmers are now fully prepared for the rains to fall. Each club member has been given enough seeds and fertilizer to plant 1 acre of maize. This acre will supply enough grain for their families for the entire year. They will use the surplus maize to pay for their inputs and save until the prices rise later next year.

Windmill go!

Second generation windmill at Mziza Demo Garden. We installed the windmill last week, letting it run over the weekend to check for any kinks. We hooked on the pumping rod today and a makeshift pump to see if we could get water into the tank. We did get water all the way to the tank, 3m above and 20m laterally from the water source.

In View

An irrigation chain: approx. 2,000 maize plants, 500 bean plants

The demo garden pumps:

A view of most of the demo:

Water flow at the demo: (onions at 2 months)

Flow at the corner:

Watering onions, with mulch:

Onion nursery near the demo, belongs to one of the Mziza club members:

Katsumwa Irrigation: Up and Running

Irrigation is underway at Katsumwa Village, Lilongwe. There are five irrigation farmers using this system and 15 additional farmers participating in the training course, to eventually start their own irrigated gardens. Up to three acres of irrigable land sits within range of the water tank. For a start the farmers have cultivated about half and acre.

Due to the sandy soil the farmers had to dig a well farther from the water tank. In order to fill the tank over that distance we installed a 200 liter drum near the pump which is connected by ground pipes to the 13,000 liter tank. As the drum fills, the pressure in the drum exceed the pressure in the tank, and water begins to flow into the tank.

The water pump can usually pump faster than the water transfers from the drum to the tank, which could lead to an overflowing tank. However, this does not present a problem under normal conditions because the farmers take short breaks while pumping, allowing the drum and tank to equalize.

Water tank:

 Distribution pipes:

 Flow under minimum pressure:

 Farmers learn pump maintenance:

Demonstrating how to water-in the basins:

 Demonstrating how to direct water into the basins:

 Demonstrating how to mulch the basins:

Getting Ready For Growth

The Mziza Farming Club is getting into irrigation as early as possible this season. On Monday this week, we delivered farm inputs which the farmers accessed through a revolving fund for input loans.

In order to access the loan, a farmer was required to participate in irrigation training and plant at least two season under the new irrigation techniques. Farmers who proved that they could be successful irrigation farmers could then apply to receive inputs to expand the size of their irrigated gardens.

Each member will pay back the loan over two consecutive planting cycles this season. In this way, the loss of capital incurred by paying back the loan is mitigated by the extra income of the second planting. In other words, with two planting cycles it is easier to balance the crop yield between: 1) paying back the loan, 2) eating a balanced diet at home, and 3) using income for other purposes (e.g. paying school fees).

Grass Mat Making at Mziza

Not just an outstanding lead farmer, our good friend Mr. Store is also an expert mat maker.

We stumbled upon his craft before a meeting with the Mziza Farming Club.

Katsumwa Irrigation Project

The Katsumwa Irrigation Project is now under way, in partnership with Good Neighbours International.

There are 20 farmers in the irrigation club. All of them will be fully trained this year. Five of them, the lead farmers in the group, will be farming a 1-2 acre garden using AWP pedal pumps and a brick water reservoir. Next year those farmers should have raised the money and gathered the resources to implement irrigation gardens on their land, and each season a new group of five will be given the chance to use the club's demo garden for experience and the chance to raise their own funds.

The abandoned primary school makes a good classroom for our farmers:

Farmers gather in the classroom:

Participation yields a user friendly calendar for February: 

Keeping bees, diversifying income

Farmers we work with regularly live hand-to-mouth. Whatever they have, it's only enough for today, if even that. Tomorrow, they will go out to their fields to get some more food, they will go to the market to sell a handful of tomatoes to afford a bar of soap, or they will simply beg from a neighbour.

One thing that can help a farmer to get his head above water long enough to save and plan for the future is to diversify his income. A farmer who relies entirely on one small irrigated garden may produce enough food for his household, but what about school fees? Clothes? Medicine?

Africa Windmill Project is introducing bee keeping to the Mziza farming club. The club will share 5 beehives to start with, and expand later out of proceeds from selling honey. The benefits of beekeeping are threefold: first, there is the income from selling honey; second, the nutritional benefit of eating the honey; and third, the bees will help pollinate crops. Oh yes, and the farmers will be encourage to conserve their forests. And also, they may use the beeswax to make candles or soap. OK, so that was fivefold... and the benefits only get better as the farmers make more hives.

Mziza club members received their first hives on Tuesday. They had never seen the Kenyan Top Bar hive design, and thought it looked a lot better than their traditional hives, which consist of an overturned clay pot. They quickly went around hanging the hives in various strategic locations.

At the same time, AWP staff members were teaching them about how to monitor the hives for pests and overflowing honey.

The club should bring enough money to purchase one new hive for each one they harvest. 5 become 10 become 20, 40, 80... within about 18 months. The limiting factor is of course space to hang them. This is where forest conservation becomes worth doing, so to speak. Without growing their forests, the farmers cannot grow their collection of hives.

Meet Khumbidze Kandodo A 63 Year old Widow from Mziza Village

When AWP formed an agriculture club in the Village of Mziza to introduce sustainable irrigation farming, few women joined, but among the few was Khumbidze Kandodo.




Khumbidze was born in 1948 in Mziza. She never had a chance to go to school in the colonial days. She used to wake up every day to help her parents do household chores and farming in the upland. She says, "back then, people did not cultivate in the dambo areas, for they had plenty food to feed themselves throughout the year." Ways of farming changed when the population started increasing, and there was continuous environmental and natural resource degradation affecting farm yields each and every year. As a result, people started cultivating in dambo areas. However, throughout the years that she has been in the dambo farming, she has had problems on how to improve soil nutrients and water holding capacity and, how to increase yield each growing season.


She said that with the coming of AWP in Malawi there has been a change in terms of farming systems in the village but especially to her life. "When I was joining the club in March, 2011, I thought, I’ll not be able to grasp the concept by looking at my literacy level,” she narrates in Chichewa. “But thanks to AWP facilitators for making the technologies understandable for me. Look at me! I am an old woman but I have done it and am determined to do better than this next year.”





To AWP staff in Malawi, Khumbidze has made a difference. Though she walks a long distance from her house to her garden, she has proved to the world that age is not a limit in development. She promises to do extraordinarily in her garden and meet some of her life needs she has never had in her life. She wants to errect a brick-fired house with iron sheets through farming with AWP.




"I have never slept in good house with iron sheets. I believe, this will be my dream come true. I will be following every theory that AWP is requiring me to implement,” she foretells. I had time to go through her small garden and managed to take a picture of what she has done with her aging potential energy. The few months that she has been with AWP, the 63 year old widow, has managed to grow cauliflower, tomato, onions and green peas.



As for Khumbidze, she does not care where to sit in the garden. She says, “soil is the foundation of life: I came from soil; soil provides me with food, water, firewood and materials for building my shelter. With AWP, I will continuously have food and have some money after selling some crops to purchase other life needs like clothes.”

--by Chawezi Simwela

Shoes!

Club members were rewarded with new working shoes, a gift to appreciate their efforts and to commend their achievements. These farmers were not bad farmers before we came along; no, they were bad believers in themselves. They lacked confidence that they could bring something to market that is new, valuable, or rare.

They have done that. And they'll do it again, in style!

Thanks to Light Feet Project from Grove church in Chandler, AZ, for their generous donation of new shoes.