Smallholder farmers, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, often lack access to soil testing laboratories to determine their soil’s fertility and the nutrients required to increase crop productivity. This causes farmers to apply fertilizer that may not meet their soil’s needs. One solution is the use of mobile soil testing kits that are inexpensive and easy to use.…
Burundi faces a continuous decrease in soil fertility due to factors such as erosion and over-exploitation of soil nutrients. To overcome challenges such as high acidity and deficiencies in phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, zinc, and copper, IFDC’s PAPAB project, with government and research partners trialed new fertilizer blends that helped increase crop yields by up to 50%.
Conventional fertilizers provide plants with three main nutrients, nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus; but soils are often deficient in secondary or micronutrients such as zinc or boron. In partnership with fertilizer manufacturer Toyota Tsusho, IFDC’s Toward Sustainable Clusters in Agribusiness through Learning in Entrepreneurship (2SCALE) project helped introduce a new blended fertilizer for rice in Kenya. Baraka (Swahili for “blessing”) contains…
After almost two weeks and six states, our biggest international training program of 2016 is complete. From August 22 to September 3, IFDC hosted and coordinated the stay of more than 40 innovative farmers, agronomists, soil scientists, researchers, and extension agents as they explored various agricultural technologies and participated in training sessions across the South and Midwest United States. Titled “Advances…
A version of the following article appeared in the July/August 2016 edition of Fertilizer Focus. The African Union’s (AU) Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP), launched in 2004, committed the AU to working with African governments to allocate 10 percent of their national budgets to agriculture to attain a 6 percent annual growth rate in the agriculture sector and a…
In our previous blog, Fertilizer – A Foundation for Food Security, we discussed the history of fertilizer, from its origins to its modern uses in combating crises of food security. Today, fertilizer is a globally distributed commodity in high demand. It is as important to the smallholder farmers’ business as the seeds they plant or the tools they use for…
The history of the modern world, from the period of industrialization on, has been characterized by a rapidly growing population and the struggle to accelerate food production to sustain that population. This struggle has manifested itself, repeatedly, in tragic episodes of human suffering centered on food and nutrition. The Great Famine in Ireland, the Indian Famine of 1899, and various…
A major factor limiting use of quality fertilizers for enhanced agricultural productivity is the unavailability of properly packaged and labeled fertilizers in quantities small-scale farmers can afford. Most often, fertilizers available on the market are packaged in 50 kg bags and sold at prices not usually affordable to many small-scale farmers, effectively preventing them from applying fertilizers on their farms.…
