News and knowhow for farmers

The NEWS platform for farming families feeding Africa

Manual on controlling deadly fall army worms

Fall Armyworm
Share on social media

By George Munene

The Fall Army­worm (FAW) is amongst the most dev­ast­at­ing pests to Africa’s food sys­tems. In re­sponse to this, ag­ri­cul­ture non­profit Land O’Lakes 37 and Villa Crop Pro­tec­tion have pre­pared freely ac­cess­ible train­ing mod­ules out­lining the ap­pro­pri­ate re­sponses small­holder farm­ers should take to com­bat this pest. 

Re­search amongst Zi­m­b­ab­wean farm-hold­ers showed that those who failed to im­ple­ment these con­trol strategies had a 50% lower per cap­ita house­hold in­come than their coun­ter­parts that im­ple­men­ted them. 

Ac­cord­ing to data from the Centre for Ag­ri­cul­ture and Bios­cience In­ter­na­tional (CABI), in the ab­sence of any con­trol meth­ods, the Fall Army­worm (FAW), causes maize yield losses of 21–53 per cent in just of 12 of Africa’s maize pro­du­cing coun­tries an­nu­ally. This amounts to 8.3 to 20.6 mil­lion tonnes; Sh267-Sh666 bil­lion in po­ten­tial losses.

Re­lated News: Solar in­sect light trap or­gan­ic­ally re­duces pests by 80%

Re­lated News: ICIPE re­leases wasp to con­trol Tuta Ab­so­luta pest that causes 100% to­mato dam­age

Small­holder maize grow­ing house­holds blighted by the pests are at a 12 per cent higher risk of ex­per­i­en­cing hun­ger.

The learn­ing mod­ules are meant to equip ex­ten­sion ser­vice pro­viders who then dis­sem­in­ate the ac­quired know­ledge and skill on crop pro­tec­tion to small­holder farm­ers. The in­form­a­tion is however open-source; freely ac­cess­ible to any­one.

Re­lated News: Re­search­ers de­velop bio­lo­gical Striga pesti­cide, im­proves yield 50%

Amongst the key areas the seven mod­ule course cov­ers in­clude: Fall Army­worm iden­ti­fic­a­tion; Chem­ical and non-chem­ical con­trols of FAW, as well as re­spons­ible chem­ical use when com­batting FAW.

The ma­ter­i­als for each mod­ule is freely avail­able for use and down­load upon re­gis­tra­tion here: https://​agritraining.​co.​za/​login


Share on social media

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top