Access Agriculture

Effective weed management in rice (Summary)

Effective weed control can increase yields by more than 50%. As a farmer it is therefore worthwhile taking a closer look. In this podcast you can learn how to control weeds most effectively.

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Managing rust diseases in wheat and barley (Summary)

Rust diseases spread through wind and can rapidly develop in cool, wet weather. To know if your crop has rust disease, rub over the infected plant part to see if a yellow, brown or black powder sticks to your fingers. By combining organic methods, you will be able to grow a healthy crop, produce more and make more profit.

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Coir pith (Summary)

Coir pith degrades so slowly that it is often considered useless for agriculture. But well-decomposed coir pith can absorb five times its weight in water. So when applied to your soil, it can hold water much better. To prepare compost out of coir pith you need to break down the lignine. This can be done by good microbes.

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Cassava harvest made easier (Summary)

Ensure your soil is rich in organic matter and grow a legume intercrop to help keep your soil loose. Plant your cuttings horizontally or at a slant so the roots grow closer to the surface. With a simple tool you can uproot your cassava twice as fast.

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Stronger plants with raised beds (Summary)

Raised beds must be 20 to 30 centimetres high, 80 to 100 centimeters wide and the furrows 30 to 40 centimeters wide. The beds can be 50 to 100 meters long depending on the slope of the field. Because the beds are wide, water is channelled faster through the land, while seeping into the soil and reaching the roots of the crop directly.

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Managing false smut of rice (Summary)

By applying a range of agroecological practices, you can avoid disease infestation in  your rice crop.

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Managing the rice leaf folder (Summary)

By combining different organic methods, you will harvest a lot more rice and make more money.

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Enriching porridge with baobab juice (Summary)

Compared to other foods, baobab pulp contains very high levels of minerals such as calcium, iron and magnesium as well as vitamin C. Furthermore, it is rich in fibre. It is good for human health and reduces the risk of diseases. Due to these properties, baobab fruits are often called a super food.

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The wasp that protects our crops (Summary)

By keeping live barriers with flowers around your fields, you help to protect the wasps and the other good insects. And it is easier to produce quinoa without insecticides while conserving our fertile soil.

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Managing aflatoxins in maize during drying and storage (Summary)

As our health and the health of our animals are at stake, let us learn from experienced farmers in Tanzania how to properly dry and store our maize.

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Managing aflatoxins in maize before and during harvest (Summary)

By keeping your soil healthy and by planting early, your plants will be strong and less vulnerable to insects and moulds. Once the maize is dry, harvest within the next two weeks. Keep the healthy ears off the ground, otherwise moulds will get on your maize and damage it during storage. Burn all the bad ears. Never feed them to your animals. 

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Killing fall armyworms naturally (Summary)

By making best use of farmers’ friends and local plants on the farm, nature will help you control the fall armyworm and reward you with a good and healthy crop.

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Scouting for fall armyworms (Summary)

Spraying pesticides is expensive and usually cannot control this pest. Visit your field twice a week for the first 6 weeks and kill any egg masses and young armyworms by hand. It is important to do scouting because without it, you will not have a harvest at the end of the day.

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Managing bacterial leaf blight in rice (Summary)

Farmers in India tell how the disease first appears in the leaf tip. Finally, the plant dries up. Non-chemical methods can be used to control this disease.

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Storing and managing maize in a warehouse (Summary)

Storing and managing stock in a warehouse involves three important steps. We should first prepare the warehouse, then store your products on pallets and third, follow and manage the stock in the warehouse.

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Harvesting maize in a good way (Summary)

Your maize is mature when the leaves and the husks start to dry and turn yellow. Start harvesting improved varieties first and end with local varieties which are more resistant to pest attacks. Dehusk your maize in the field to avoid bringing pests to your home. Properly sort your maize in the field, burn the cobs that have been attacked and store the healthy ones.

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Compost from rice straw (Summary)

Small scale farmers can struggle to keep their soil healthy, and often resort to buying fertilisers to improve their yield, but with a bit of extra work to make compost, yield can be increased naturally and the soil improved year by year. To turn your rice straw into compost, requires a series of steps that control and accelerate the decomposition by microorganisms. With the right conditions, your compost will be ready in 4 months.

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Silage from maize (Summary)

Without any air, finely chopped green maize ferments without rotting. This is because micro-organisms digest the sugars in the fodder and produce lactic acid, which acts as a natural preservative. The key to making silage is to create the right conditions for a good fermentation.

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Hydroponic fodder (Summary)

Saving water, minimum land use, less labour, faster growth, giving a high yield of highly nourishing fodder that will improve your livestock. These are the key benefits in hydroponic fodder production.

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Intercropping maize with pigeon peas (Summary)

Legumes like pigeon peas take nitrogen from the air and deposit it into the soil.  When pigeon peas are intercropped the root nodules release valuable nitrogen to the other crop.  
Any roots, leaves or stems of the pigeon pea plant that stay in the field also help to improve the soil.

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Managing aflatoxins in groundnuts during drying and storage (Summary)

Certain moulds grow on groundnut, maize and other foods. These moulds produce a poison called aflatoxin. To have healthy groundnuts it is important to care for the groundnut during its whole growth, but especially during drying and storage.

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Striga management in rice (Summary)

Farmers in Madagascar show how following four key principles can give you a good rice harvest despite the presence of striga.

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Let's store our maize well (Summary)

Maize grains have to be very dry and clean before you store them. The grains will stay free of pests and diseases for a long time in a metal granary, if you store them correctly.

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Bending over the maize (Summary)

A traditional Central American practice is to bend over the maize stalk to help dry the maize and to protect it from disease and pest damage. If you do this at just the right time, you will harvest more. Maize grains keep growing until a black spot appears at the base of the grain. At that time, the plant has lost all of its green color, this is when you bend the maize stalk, to allow the grains to keep drying.

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Controlling maize tar spot (Summary)

Maize tar spot is a serious pest of maize. To help prevent it, it is important to burn the crop residues from the previous year, or plant your maize in land that did not have maize the year before. Some maize varieties are resistant to this disease.

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Beans as a relay crop (Summary)

Relay cropping beans between rows of maize helps to fertilize the maize, they can be planted before the maize is harvested. Plant them two to a hill and 25 centimetres apart. After you harvest the beans you can store them in a metal granary.
 
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Stone lines (Summary)

Stone lines induce a natural process of terracing as they trap sediments. They are also built to rehabilitate eroded lands. Farmers in Kenya show how they construct stone lines. 

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Self help group (Summary)

As individual farmers lack resources to invest in, or learn about, Conservation Agriculture. This audio podcast features a group in Kenya that has come together to share knowledge and equipment and to assist each other.

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Staking climbing beans (Summary)

Wooden stakes are the strongest support for climbing beans and can be used for many seasons, but wood is in high demand for construction and fuel wood. Farmers in southwest Uganda tell us different ways of staking beans, with or without wood.

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Selecting new rice varieties (Summary)

Participatory varietal selection or PVS is a method that allows different stakeholders to get involved in identifying constraints and selecting new varieties out of the hundreds developed by rice breeders. During three years multiple stakeholders are involved in mother trials, baby trials and tasting tests.

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Drying and storing chillies (Summary)

Farmers in southern Malawi have come up with their own clever ways to harvest, dry, grade and store their chillies. To remove the pain in their hands after harvesting the chillies, they use various techniques. The biggest enemy of stored chillies is moisture, as this may result in your chillies getting mouldy and developing a poisonous product, called aflatoxin. Therefore avoid keeping your chillies in a polythene sack as moisture can build up in the sack.

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Soya sowing density (Summary)

To achieve the best density of soya bean plants in our field, we must take four precautions: 1. Use seeds that grow well; 2. Narrow the space between seedling rows and between holes; 3. Do not step on the planting holes of the field; and 4. Control the rodents that eat seeds and seedlings after sowing.

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Sowing and thinning sorghum (Summary)

Increasing plant populations by reducing the planting distance is a key step to achieving a uniform crop stand and a high yield. On the other hand, when plants are too close to each other this can hamper good crop development. The plants will be thin and will be susceptible to diseases and pests such as the parasitic weed striga. In this video, we will learn about the best planting density for sorghum. We will understand what factors can affect crop establishment, and then see how thinning and transplanting can help to get a uniform crop stand and high yield.

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Growing cassava on poor soils (Summary)

Farmers in Cote d’Ivoire show how they improve their cassava production and restore soil fertility. There are five things to do: use improved varieties that are resistant to the cassava mosaic virus; apply organic matter; apply small doses of mineral fertiliser; grow a legume in between our cassava; and plant the cassava in lines, leaving sufficient space between the lines.

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Rotary weeder (Summary)

Effective weed management can increase yields by more than 50%, but usually takes a lot of time. As a farmer it is therefore worthwhile investing in labour-saving weed management tools. In this video you can learn how to control weeds in lowland rice using the rotary weeder.

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Strip tillage (Summary)

Strip tillage keeps crop stubble and helps to conserve soil moisture by tilling only those parts of the fields where the seed and fertiliser is placed. By using a two-wheel tractor with a specially designed attachment box, the seed and fertiliser are placed in the soil at the same time as tilling.

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Bed planting (Summary)

With bed planting, rapidly rotating blades first till the soil. The soil is then reshaped into long beds that alternate with furrows. This technique significantly reduces the amount of water needed for irrigating wheat and is increasingly applied throughout South Asia.

Note: This podcast contains some content referring to mineral fertilizer and pesticides

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Contour bunds (Summary)

In the semi-arid savannas where rainfall is limited and highly unpredictable, retaining more water in the soil can make the difference between a poor and a good harvest. You can slow down the runoff water by establishing contour bunds. Contour bunds are permanent ridges of earth that follow positions located at the same altitude. For over 20 years, farmers in Burkina Faso and Mali have made contour bunds in their fields on rolling land with less than a 5% slope.

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Reviving soils with mucuna (Summary)

In the coastal savanna of West Africa, farmers explain how a mucuna cover crop helped to revive their highly degraded soil, and suppress the noxious weeds Striga and Imperata. They show how to grow it to benefit your maize and cassava, and why discussing land tenure in your community really matters.

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Well dried seed is good seed (Summary)

Farmers face great difficulties with drying their seeds because seed absorbs moisture from the soil. As a result, seed quality deteriorates, and no-one can expect good yields by using poor quality seed. In this video you can see how farmers of Maria village solved this problem. Now they are no longer worried about drying seed, even during the rainy season.

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Succeed with seeds (Summary)

During weekly visits, and supported by their extension agent, a farmer field school in Tanzania learns how to test different sorghum varieties for striga resistance and evaluate how each one performs under different practices.

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The rice seedbed (Summary)

In this audio podcast, you can learn how to prepare a seedbed, as establishing a good seedbed is needed to obtain strong seedlings and give your rice crop a good start. Let’s look at it step by step.

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Striga biology (Summary)

One of the major parasites is striga, a weed that sucks the juice and nutrients from cereal crops such as millet, sorghum and maize and causes great yield losses. A single striga plant can produce hundreds of thousands of seeds. The seeds are so tiny that most farmers do not know they are seeds. They really look more like black dust. But don’t be fooled.

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Storing cowpea seed (Summary)

Intercropping or rotating cereal crops with legume crops are two of the strategies of integrated striga and soil fertility management. But keeping quality legume seed has two major challenges. First, the seed easily loses its ability to germinate. And second, we are not the only ones who love legumes. Let’s listen to some farmers from northern Ghana.

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Spotted Seed - Diseased Seed (Summary)

There are many problems with poor seed, and spotted and discoloured seed are some of the major ones. Spotted seeds can't be removed by winnowing or seed flotation. They can only be removed by manual sorting. This video will show you how to clean seed as one of the interventions to produce and use healthy seed.

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Seed sorting by flotation (Summary)

Why not try the technique of seed flotation before sowing your seed. By using this technique any poor seeds which have been attacked by insects will float to the top, leaving the good seed on the bottom.

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Rice transplanting (Summary)

Yields are much higher when rice is transplanted. Compared to broadcasting, yields are two or three times higher. So why not watch this video and find out how and why.

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Rice seed preservation (Summary)

Based on hard real-life experience, the women of Maria village have devised some very effective techniques for seed preservation. So why not learn from some of these innovative women.

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Let’s talk money (Summary)

The economic analysis allows farmers to know how much money they earn or how much they will lose by changing from one technology to another, or from one practice to another. This helps them make a decision for the following year as to which practice they want to try out in their own fields.

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Land preparation for rice (Summary)

How do land preparation and water management affect crop establishment, weed management and rice yields? And why does a field need to be perfectly levelled to make best use of fertilizers? In this audio podcast you can learn the answers to these and other questions.

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Joining hands against striga (Summary)

It is important to pull striga weeds with your hands before the time it produces seeds and spreads. As it is laborious, better reduce the number of striga plants by applying compost or manure, and by rotating or intercropping with non-cereal crops, such as cowpea. In combination with these practices, hand pulling becomes less laborious. Farmers in Tanzania and Mali join hands to reduce the drudgery of hand pulling. Their community effort also helps them avoid spreading striga seeds to neighbouring fields.

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Improving Rice Quality (Summary)

What steps can be taken to make sure that locally grown rice can compete against imports? Improving quality which can lead to increased profits for farmers.

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Grow row by row (Summary)

Farmers in northern Nigeria are changing the way they intercrop their sorghum and millet with cowpea. By planting both crops at higher densities and in separate rows, and by applying some organic and mineral fertilizer, they harvest more and reduce damage by the parasitic weed striga. It is one of the strategies of integrated striga and soil fertility management.

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