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Agronomic insights & advice on what to grow, when to plant, how to grow it and how much profits you made on your own farm.

The same rain that drowns your neighbour's maize can be exactly what your rice needs this year - if you hold it instead ...
07/09/2026

The same rain that drowns your neighbour's maize can be exactly what your rice needs this year - if you hold it instead of letting it run off.

Walk your lowest, wettest plot first. If it holds a sheet of water, bund it for lowland rice; if it only catches rain on a gentle slope, plant upland NERICA instead, which is bred to yield on rainfall alone and matures in under 90-100 days.

For transplanted lowland rice, raise about 80-100 kg of seed (roughly two 50 kg bags) in a nursery per hectare - about 1000 m2 of nursery bed covers a hectare - and move seedlings out at 14-21 days, spaced 20x20 cm with 2-3 seedlings a hill. Hold a thin sheet of about 5 cm of water from a week after transplanting right through grain-filling, and never let the field dry out at flowering. Drain it 7-10 days before harvest so it firms up and ripens evenly.

Split your nitrogen into three doses - at transplanting, mid-tillering and panicle initiation - and never put down more than one and a half bags of urea at once; too much nitrogen at once feeds rice blast. Plant with your neighbours in one window too, so no single field is the only ripe target for birds.

Mark your bunded field or order NERICA seed this week, and get your nursery bed ready. Send this to anyone with a plot low enough to hold water this season.

When the maize looks thin this dry season, your hens and goats are what keeps cash coming in - but only if you protect f...
04/09/2026

When the maize looks thin this dry season, your hens and goats are what keeps cash coming in - but only if you protect four things before the grass disappears.

Water first. Chickens drink about twice the weight of what they eat, and 2-4 times more once it gets hot - never let a drinker run dry. Goats need about 4-5 litres a day each in a dry season (call it one 20-litre bucket for every 4-5 adult goats), and a milking doe drinks far more - up to 13 litres. In a Sahel trial, ewes watered only every three days lost more than half their milk. Don't ration a lactating animal.

Second, build a feed store now while there's still grass to cut: cure maize stover and legume haulms off the ground, and stock cut-and-carry browse like leucaena or sesbania for when grazing runs out.

Third, shade the run, the kraal and every water point through the hottest hours - chickens start struggling above about 29C.

Fourth, vaccinate against Newcastle disease every 3-4 months with the I-2 eye-drop vaccine. It survives 8 weeks without a fridge and gives about 80% protection, against a disease that can wipe out an unvaccinated flock entirely.

Set up one shaded, clean water point this week and book the vaccination - those two moves protect the most income for the least money. Send this to whoever's flock you worry about most.

If the rain this Season A comes the way forecasters expect - heavier, more erratic - the risk on your hillside isn't dro...
03/09/2026

If the rain this Season A comes the way forecasters expect - heavier, more erratic - the risk on your hillside isn't drought, it's watching your topsoil wash down the slope before your beans even flower.

Rwanda already loses about 25 tonnes of topsoil per hectare every year - roughly RWF 37.9 billion in lost harvest across the country. On bare ground, a single heavy storm can carry away in an hour what took years to build.

The fix costs almost nothing: leaving crop residue on the surface instead of clearing it cut soil loss from 200 tonnes per hectare down to just 0.4 in FAO trials - over 99%. Add a contour bund or terrace across the slope (match progressive terraces to gentle ground, radical bench terraces above a 50% slope), and a grassed waterway to carry what the terraces shed to a proper drain instead of a gully.

On your potato plot, dig a 30cm hole and fill it with water - if it hasn't drained by the next day, don't plant potato there this season; wet ground plus cool weather is exactly what late blight wants, and an unsprayed crop can lose 80-100% of its yield.

Walk your steepest plot this week and peg one contour line with a stone on a string. Send this to whoever farms the hill next to you - their run-off becomes your problem too.

Two weeks without rain and your vegetable bed is asking for water you don't have to spare. Before you panic-carry bucket...
02/09/2026

Two weeks without rain and your vegetable bed is asking for water you don't have to spare. Before you panic-carry buckets, do the maths first.

A fruiting bed like tomato or pepper drinks about 6-8 litres per square metre a day at its thirstiest. So a modest 10 m² bed needs roughly 60-80 litres at peak — three to four 20-litre buckets, not the whole tank.

Don't guess when to water either. Dig 15 cm into the root zone, grab a handful of soil and squeeze it. If it forms a ball and leaves a light stain on your palm, it's still moist — leave it. If it crumbles with no stain, water now.

If you're carrying every litre by hand, a low-cost drip kit (from about US$5) puts water straight at the root instead of the path, and a 5-10 cm mulch blanket over the bed cuts evaporation enough to lift water-use efficiency by around 20%. In Zambia, farmers who moved from a bucket to a treadle pump (US$50-120) took a 0.25 ha plot from about US$125 a season to US$850-1,700.

Water at dawn or dusk, not midday — the heat alone can waste 20-30% of every bucket before it reaches the roots.

Measure your thirstiest bed this evening, work out what it actually needs, and mulch it before you water tomorrow morning. Send this to whoever's been carrying twice the water they need to.

A 10 m2 bed near a water source can carry you through the dry months in a way the main field can't. Leafy greens like am...
01/09/2026

A 10 m2 bed near a water source can carry you through the dry months in a way the main field can't. Leafy greens like amaranth and sukuma wiki give you a first cut in about six weeks, then more every 2-3 weeks after. Plant tomato alongside and, over a season, that same bed can yield enough to fill a full market basket - 45 to 60 kg.

The water isn't as much as it sounds. A tomato crop needs roughly 5 litres per square metre a day on average, so a 10 m2 bed drinks about 50 litres - two to three 20-litre cans - on a hot day. Don't guess when to water: push a finger into the soil, and if it's dry at the fingertip, it's time. Mulch with a finger-thick layer of dry grass or leaves and you cut how often you need to fill that can.

Pests will test you - aphids, whitefly and the tomato leafminer Tuta absoluta especially. Work cheap first: pull infested leaves, rotate what you plant where, net your beds (this alone has cut spraying by about 70% and lifted marketable yield 35-70% in trials), then hang pheromone or sticky traps, then neem or a simple soap wash. Chemicals are the last resort, not the first.

The real income trick is staggering: sow greens every 2-3 weeks and set tomato out in batches a month apart, so you're harvesting into the price gap instead of flooding the market on one day.

Tag a farmer who's sitting on a good water source and doing nothing with it yet.

Not every part of Tanzania should plant this Vuli - but if you're in Kagera, Mwanza, Shinyanga, Arusha, Kilimanjaro, Tan...
31/08/2026

Not every part of Tanzania should plant this Vuli - but if you're in Kagera, Mwanza, Shinyanga, Arusha, Kilimanjaro, Tanga, Pwani or Unguja and Pemba, this could be a good season to plant into. El Niño usually loads the short rains with more water, not less, and December is shaping up as the wettest month.

The catch is the calendar, not the water. Vuli only runs October to December, so whatever you plant has to finish inside that window. An early maize like Situka matures in about 75 days against 90-plus for standard types, and an early bean variety like Selian 13 finishes in 60-75 days - both leave you enough margin even if the rains start a little late or end a little early.

If you farm Dodoma, Tabora, Mbeya, Njombe, Mtwara or anywhere else in the single-season centre and south, there's no separate Vuli for you - save the seed and use this time to prepare land for the Msimu instead.

For anyone planting: raise your beds so water drains off the roots rather than sitting on them, and don't w**d or harvest when leaves are wet, because that's how blights spread plant to plant. Once the grain's in, dry it until a kernel cracks rather than dents - that's the point aflatoxin mould can no longer grow.

Know a neighbour who's not sure whether their region gets a Vuli this year? Send them this.

Manage your farm like a Pro. Get agronomic insights & advice on what to grow, when to plant, how to grow it and how much...
26/08/2026

Manage your farm like a Pro. Get agronomic insights & advice on what to grow, when to plant, how to grow it and how much profits you made on your own farm.

In the last big El Niño, South Africa's maize crop fell 47% below its five-year average - down to about 68 bags of 50 kg...
26/08/2026

In the last big El Niño, South Africa's maize crop fell 47% below its five-year average - down to about 68 bags of 50 kg per hectare, on land that should have carried far more.

Two things kept farmers in business through that kind of year, and both are worth setting up before this season's rains: seed bred for dry weather, and insurance that pays without an assessor ever visiting your field.

On plots that usually get under 500 mm a season, sorghum recovers faster from a dry spell than maize does. On wetter ground, an early-maturing drought-tolerant maize hybrid can yield 20-30% more than an ordinary variety when the mid-season turns dry.

The insurance side works differently to what you might expect. Weather-index cover pays out when a measured trigger - rainfall, soil moisture or satellite greenness - crosses a set line. There's no claim to file and no farm visit to wait on, so the money can land within weeks, in time to replant or buy feed rather than months later, once the damage is already done.

You don't buy this alone. Cooperatives and some input bundles pool many small plots into one policy, which is what keeps the premium affordable for a small farm.

Before you commit seed this season, ask your cooperative or input dealer one question: does this come with weather-index cover, and how do I register my plot? Send this to whoever in your co-op handles the input orders.

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