A farmer in Siaya has fought striga weeds that had made her farm unusable and won by uprooting and burying the weeds, followed by crop rotation increasing her harvest from five bags to 24 bags.
More than 20 million hectares of sub-Saharan Africa’s farmland are affected each year by striga. According to international maize researchers at CIMMYT, this costs the continent one billion dollars in potential maize harvests annually. In Kenya, 340,000 hectares of farming land are affected with Western Kenya bearing the brunt of Striga as the weed affects 40-70 per cent of land under maize in the region.
A faithful FarmbizAfrica reader for close to half a decade, Suzie Kamakei first learned how to destroy the weed by uprooting it by hand and burying it deep into the soil. “The article advised that farmers dig a hole that is a jembe deep and bury the weeds when they are young and before they start to flower and produce any seeds to avoid them spreading on the farm,” she said.
A single striga weed produces up to 200,000 seeds. This means that after they flower and produce seeds, just 20 striga can fill one hectare of soil with up to 40 billion seeds.
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Before reading the article, the young farmer and her husband who are based in Siaya had struggled for two years to get any maize harvest from the 0.9 acres of land they had bought in 2020.
“Every harvest, the maize cobs were puffed up, and maize seeds were shrunken. Before reading Farmbiz, we were slashing the weed and leaving the weed to rot on the farm or burning it. We did not know at the time that we were making the problem worse by spreading striga seeds all across our farm,” Suzie recounted.
Through Farmbiz, she also read about the incredible strides other farmers had made by joining farmer groups. This inspired her to seek out farmer groups in her village which brought her to the Siaya Cereal Growers Sacco.
“Since 2022, I have been attending farmer meetings every Tuesday religiously,” she beamed. Through trainers and shared farmer experience, she was able to add more bows to help rid her of the plague that is striga.
“First I learned that we had to rotate the crops we grew because continuously having maize on the same plot of land, which most farmers still do, made striga worse,” she informed. The seeds of the weed which affects cereals such as maize, millet, sorghum, rice, as well as Napier grass, and sugarcane can survive in the soil for more than 20 years without any water or nutrients but are immediately woken up once maize is planted.
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The farmers were encouraged to rotate different crops and even crops from different families. “We grow traditional vegetables or spinach one season, sorghum the next, then go back to maize,” Suzie said.
Crop rotation has been shown to reduce Striga by up to 50 per cent as seasons when the weed’s growing is interrupted causes some of the seeds to die.