The rise of jam, juices and foods from gathered prickly pears could now develop into widespread cactus farming, with farmers in China’s arid areas now producing nearly 3 tonnes a hectare of foods and feeds with almost no rain by planting and harvesting the apple cactus.
The farmers are harvesting 2.8 tonnes a hectare of apple cactus fruits on previously unusable rocky desert soils, which are earning them about one million shillings a year in sales. The cactus farming offers a new way forward for farmers in Africa’s arid regions, which receive just 200mm of rain, with Kenyan farmers already using cacti leaves as drought feed for their cattle, offering healthy and nutritious food that also provides animal feed that lifts their milk yields.
“Dry areas are only getting dryer because of climate change. These drought issues are making it harder to grow traditional crops such as maize,” explained John Cushman, a Biology professor at Nevada University. The findings from a five-year study by the university on the use of cacti as a high-temperature and low-water commercial crop found that it offered an alternative to traditional crops in arid areas as they produce fruits, as well as human food and livestock feed from their leaves despite consuming 80 per cent less water.
The apple cactus, which is similar to Kenya’s prickly pear, grows where no other fruit can be produced, and is also now helping farmers fight desertification which has degraded three-quarters of the earth’s land area and affects more than two billion people. Cactii grow in desert regions with rainfall as low as 200-300 mm and can thrive in temperatures as high as 60 to 70°C. This makes them made for the world’s semi-arid and arid areas which make up 42 per cent of the world’s landmass.
Farmers harvest up to 25 tonnes of cacti fruits per hectare in African countries like South Africa, Tunisia, and Morocco. The fruit has similar qualities to both orange and papaya and is high in anti-oxidants which prevent diseases of aging, cancers, heart disease, and stroke.
The cacti leaves are also a valuable crop as animal feed. Animals like their taste, find them easy to digest and they mostly contain water so reduce the water needed to be provided to animals.
From one or two cacti grown on individual properties in 2021, farmers in the Zhuangzitian village of China now grow 93.33 hectares of the desert fruit from which farmers harvest more than 260 tonnes the ‘opuntia’ apple cactus. The fruits which are slightly sweet to tangy in taste earned its farmers more than Sh89.4 million in sales per year. Meanwhile, its crunchy leaves or pads have made their way into many diets in southeast China where they are harvested while still young, have their sharp thorns removed, and eaten raw, in salads, or cooked to make soups and stews.
They need to be combined with protein-rich feed to complete an animal’s daily diet because they are rich in carbohydrates and calcium but have little protein.
Cattle can eat up to 70kg of fresh opuntia leaves every day while sheep consume six to eight kilograms. They are an excellent source of cost-effective supplementary feed for the leftover cereal crops and natural pasture in rangelands where feed is limited.
Grazing goats that feed on alfalfa hay and had cacti leaves added to their diets increased their milk yield by almost half to 436g every day.
When fed together with protein-rich feed, cacti leaves have also been shown to replace more expensive barley grains or maize silage without affecting weight gain in both sheep and cattle.
Animals given an adequate amount of the leaves also need very little additional water. A lack of water is directly tied to the amount of feed an animal can eat, making cacti a lifesaver in times of drought.
In Kenya, the invasive prickly pear shrub is already being harvested from wild plants and used to make jams, juices, yoghurt, wine, oil, and honey. The Laikipia Permaculture Center which works with more than 700 women buys the thorny fruit which grows wildly in Laikipia for Sh500 a crate.
Other innovative ways cacti are being used in Kenya are in the making of cactus leather and cookies. Vincent Muhoro the founder of Dunia Bora and a winner of the Green Changemakers Challenge, buys cacti leaves and fruits from herders in arid Isiolo.
Cactus hedges have also been used to control soil erosion and have been shown to retain 100 tons of soil from getting eroded in one hectare annually. Arid soils without cactus also have 40 to 200 per cent less organic matter and nitrogen.
Photo: Stan Shebs / Wikimedia Commons