A university in Nyeri has joined a global consortium of agricultural centres to develop a farming package that uses three crops to help each other, slashing input costs, and tripling outputs in 12 months of constant sales. The package is now being launched to Kenyan farmers complete with markets for the chia seeds, oyster mushrooms, and pork meat it produces.
The CHIAM (Integrated Chia and Oyster Mushroom) farming project is teaching farmers how to grow and harvest chia, use the chia stalks to grow oyster mushroom, the mushroom waste for pig feed, and the pig manure to power small, flexible biogas plants whose bioslurry is pumped back to the farm as high-grade fertiliser.
“CHIAM is a new circular farming model where nothing is wasted. Farmers grow drought-resistant chia seeds which do well with 38 per cent less water than maize, they then use the chia stalks left behind after harvesting the seeds as the soil to grow oyster mushrooms in buckets. What is left behind– spent mushroom substrate– is then used as pig feed. The pig’s manure is fed to a biogas plant to produce energy and eventually the manure slurry collected from the plant is taken to fertilises the soil,” explained Melonie Karia, Keyria Farm’s country programs manager.
The CHIAM project is being spearheaded by a consortium of universities and private farms across the world. These include Keyria Farm in Muranga and Dedan Kimathi University of Technology in Nyeri, the Agricultural Research Center in Egypt, the University of Sultan Moulay Slimane in Morocco, the Center for Scientific and Technical Research on Arid Regions in Algeria, Hungary’s leading mushroom grower, Pilze-Nagy Kft, the Bay Zoltán Institute of Applied Research also in Hungary, and the University of Hohenheim in Germany.
“When I got two acres of farmland I asked myself, will I grow the usual maize and beans being grown by everyone else around me?,” asked Wilberforce Wanjala– a farmer in Busia who is amongst the forefront practitioners of CHIAM.
By chance around the same time he came across a post on facebook that was looking for chia farmers– a crop he had at the time never heard of. Once he got more details about it from him and did his own research on chia farming he settled on growing the little known crop.
Chia is grown in the exact same way as maize and beans. It needs two weeding cycles, the first, one month after planting and again after two weeks.
Once it is harvested it needs to be cleaned before it is sold. Chia seeds are cleaned by threshing– being shaken or beat to remove the seeds from thor pods the sifting to remove any debris from the seed.
100 grams of chia seeds costs up to Sh500-Sh600 in local suparmarkets and Sh700 in organic shops.
Morris Ikonya, the CEO of Mycelia & Foods Ltd which contracts mushroom farmers explained that oyster mushrooms are easy to grow because, unlike the popular mushroom in Kenya, the button mushroom – which requires a bed of already decomposed compost to grow – they do the decomposing themselves. “Oyster mushrooms are hardy and grow best in beds of rice and wheat straw, sugarcane bagasse, maize stalks and cobs, banana leaves, sawdust and now we are trying them out with chia stalks and they are growing really well,” he said.
The demand for oyster mushrooms in Kenya has been on the upswing because of their savoury taste as well as high protein content.
Chia stalks are ‘sterilised’ by being put in a bucket or in growing bag where the water or moisture content is 50-70 per cent of the growing straw. Thye are then inoculated– served with the mushroom growing seed.
“You can get up to 60 percent mushrooms for every kilogram of chia stalks used,” he said. A 7X6 meter space can take in up to 3,000 mushroom-growing bags each weighing two and a half kilograms.
Oyster mushrooms are harvested for a period of not less than three months and are sold in 250 gram punnets for Sh100 to Sh250 depending on the season. Some farmers also deliver them directly to houses and earn three times more.
Ikonya sells his mushrooms to Naivas, Carrefour, Quickmart and to hotels and groceries.
The waste from mushrooms or spent mushroom substrate (SMS) has been used as an inexpensive feedstuff that reduce the cost of pig feeds while giving the animals high class nutrition.
Research has proven that supplementing pig feed with 30 per cent fermented oyster mushroom waste increases pigs’ average daily weight gain and it’s increases its ability to converd feed into meat more effectively.
The waste produced by the pigs is taken to dometic biogas digesters designed specifically for smallholder farmers.
In Kenya, makers of smaller unit prefabricated biodigesters include Sistema.bio which costs Sh50,000 to Sh100,000, and Flexi Biogas which makes portable biogas systems for Sh25,000 to Sh60,000. Farmers need specialised help maintaining the biodigesters, with periodic checks from qualified technicians, or they can be dangerous and cause explosions.
The biogas can also be used to fuel driers to dry the oyster mushrooms when a farmer has excess production or lacks a market for them.
The bioslurry that is a byproduct of biogas can increase crop yields by 25 per cent while halving the use of chemical fertilisers. Since it is a slurry (watery) it can be fed to farms using pipes or furrow systems and helps improve the structure of the soil, its fertility, and ability to hold water.
Photo courtesy: @DeKUTkenya
For more information on CHIAM, reach Melonie Karia on 0722517529
Hello, it is well noted that herbs farming is also a booming business. Kindly give the best herbs and their markets especially in locally and also export. Am one of the herbs farmers in Kenya but market is a challenge.