Cassava farming transforms female farmer’s life
By Gloria Siwisha
MAUREEN Bwalya, a farmer under the supervision of Musa Agricultural Camp in Kasama District of Northern Province, is a dedicated cassava producer. She knows it is her family’s only means of survival.
However, Maureen no longer enjoys the painstaking task of making ridges for her crop season after season, which requires a significant amount of labour and time.
This, coupled with the declining soil fertility, was threatening the success of her cassava business.
That is why in the year 2020, she did not think twice about enlisting as a participant in the Sustainable Intensification of Smallholder Farming Systems (SIFAZ) Project in Zambia, which was working with farmers to co-develop technologies that respond to specific farmer challenges. The promoted technologies promised potential yield gap reduction as they employ sustainable intensification practices (SIPs) anchored on conservation agriculture principles.
The goal of the project is to address challenges that smallholder farmers experience in their farming activities, including a decline of soil fertility, weed pressure and labour deficit, which leads to low crop productivity and production and lack of stable markets.
“What stirred me into accepting the SIFAZ technologies was that they promoted flat land cultivation and intercropping of cassava with beans and groundnuts. This method of farming is not only a complete departure from the laborious ridges that I struggled with, but also boosts yields significantly,” Maureen narrated.
The 2020-2021 farming season marked the beginning of the positive transformation of Maureen’s cassava business. She was assigned to establish and manage a 10 x 10 metres baby trial field where cassava, her primary crop of interest, was intercropped with groundnuts and beans on flat land.
Her farming did very well that season such that she successfully harvested and sold beans, groundnuts, cassava leaves, fresh cassava tubers and cassava cuttings or seed, all of which earned her a decent income.
“From the same yield, I was also able to sell dried cassava and sometimes had it roasted. The schools in particular preferred cassava leaves, which they consumed as relish. So, the fact that I was able to earn so much on a 10 x 10 metres piece of land and by simply utilising flat land cultivation of cassava that’s intercropped with legumes motivated me to expand my farming to two 50 x 60 metres mother trial fields the following season, and later to three mother trials which enabled me record remarkable earnings of K17,140 and K40,000, respectively,” Maureen shared.
With her income becoming increasingly better since embracing SIFAZ interventions, she has been able to transform her cassava business into a lucrative one, enabling her to meet her family’s daily needs of food, shelter and education, including attending to the health needs of her aging mother.
From the 2023-2024 farming season’s harvest proceeds, Maureen managed to buy a motorbike with cash worth K29,500, as she needed transport to be able to reach her customers faster.
Maureen is so enterprising that she has also expanded into value addition, processing cassava into flour for cake baking, biscuits, scones and fritters, which she supplies to schools and shop owners, thereby setting an inspiring example to other farmers in her community.
At the time of the interview for this article, Maureen had received customers who had come to buy 90 bundles of cassava cuttings at a cost of over K13,000, a testament to the versatility of the crop.
She now looks forward to supplying cassava to companies for industrial use.
By strategically incorporating conservation agriculture principles of minimum soil disturbance, crop diversification and rotation, and permanent soil cover into cassava production, Maureen has not only ensured a profitable yield but has also attracted interest from over 50 neighbouring farmers, who also want to be like her someday.
Her story, therefore, truly serves as a perfect example of how farmers can realise real benefits by simply embracing agricultural technologies that not only promote yield gap reduction, climate change adaptation, and soil health improvement, but are also sensitive to the agro-ecological and socio-economic conditions affecting smallholder farming systems in Zambia.
Maureen appreciates the support she has so far received through the European Union (EU)-funded SIFAZ Project, implemented by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in close collaboration with CIMMYT and the Ministry of Agriculture.-NAIS
