Years of repeated tilling the same piece of land with a hand hoe has compacted the soil in Malawi into a hard layer. Plant roots cannot penetrate this “hard pan” and they grow laterally, instead of vertically. Rainwater does not penetrate the soil either but rushes along the furrows created in the land, washing away the top soil. This is drastically reducing agricultural production plummeting Malawi, whose youthful population is dependent on
agriculture, into crisis. Climate crisis is making things worse. There are heavy periods of rain, followed by dry spells and more frequent cyclones. Standing crops are swept away and heavy rain exacerbates soil erosion. Spells of drought makes plants, already deprived of soil moisture, wither.
The solution is simple. Break down the hard pan of the soil.
Create deep beds and plant the crops there so that they are protected from storms. Rainwater seeps into the soil so that the soil has enough moisture during droughts. Tiyeni, a local Malawi NGO has been training farmers on this technique of “deep bed farming” for more than a decade.
They work with government extension workers who in turn work with lead farmers who demonstrate these techniques to other farmers.. Some of them have quadrupled their yields. Tiyeni has worked with 30,000 farmers across the county.
It does not cost too much money to train farmers. Isaac Chavula feels that with about 450 million Malawian Kwachas (less than US$ 300k) they can cover a lot of the country. He also thinks it is a “lot of money”. That is because funding for Tiyeni has been hard to come by – the funding they get is from projects they do with universities or companies. They are partnering with SIWI to raise the profile of rainfed farming. Most of Sub-Saharan Africa’s land is not irrigated. Governments have too little money to invest in large irrigation projects. If all farmers in Malawi could adopt deep bed farming, there may not be need to spend a lot of money either in solving the looming problem of food security.

Sections

Section 1: First 20 minutes introduction to the problem of agriculture in Malawi and the solution to the problem , Deep Bed Farming.

Section 2: Next 23 minutes on what needs to be done so that Malawi farmers have access to the solution.

Host: Sanjoy Sanyal, Founder Regain Paradise
Website www.regainparadise.org
Guests : Isaac Monjo Chavula, Country Director, Tiyeni
Kasonde Mulenga, Programme Manager, SIWI

Guests Website and contact details. https://www.tiyeni.org/, isaacmonjo.chavula@tiyeni.org
https://siwi.org/, kasonde.mulenga@siwi.org