First Farm Visit

This week I visited Atunibah to see some of the farms that are working during the dry season. The first person I met was Ameil, who has been a farmer for 7 -8 years and is actually the younger brother of the BAWA manager Mr Valentine who is 1 of 20 siblings! When he is not farming he is at the University of Bamenda studying accountancy. Their parents farm maize during the wet season and then he farms perishable garden vegetables during the dry season.

I was intrigued to see how they managed to get water to the plants during the dry season. Firstly they built a canal that brings water from the streams up in the mountains to a river near the farms. Then they will damn this river and move the water into a series of hand dug channels which direct the water to the farms.

Stream from uplands canal

Canal to farms

canal to farms 

When the water reaches the farms it floods the lower sections and is transferred to the hills by a plate, making it very inefficient.

I talked about the two different options of sprinklers and a pipe doing drip irrigation and they seemed to favour the pipe borne irrigation as they say one of their problems is the expensive pesticides they use and when it rains they have to apply this more frequently. 

pesticides

Ameil took us to his nursery for the tomato plants, this is next to the compound. The beds are covered by leaves to stop the heavy rain damaging the plants. They will be ready to plant in November ready for the dry season.

Nursary

I then met Mr Tangang Rene who has been farming for 17 years. He told me about some of the land that has to have been abandoned for 3 years as nothing can grow. This is an issue when similar crops are grown year after year. He told me that all the farmers live near the farmland meaning that they can get to the farms easier. They visit the farms everyday, even on country Sunday when farming activity is prohibited. On that day they simply look at the crops to see if everything is okay. This is good news for my project as I was worried that the days off would affect the irrigation schedule for the plants.

We also visited a plantain farm, the trees are so big and separated that they tend not to irrigate during the dry season and the trees die. 

Plantain farm

New Plantain tree

 We met another farmer named Victor he had been farming for 3 years growing tomatoes and huckleberry. The maize on the farm had recently been harvested and he was preparing the farm for the new crops.

Victors Farm

After this a group of farmers turned up to answer some of my questions about farms. There was; (left to right) Madam Teresa who is a BAWA board member, Victor who has been farming for 3 year, Zavier who had been farming 3 years, Adof who had been farming 8 years, Kisitor my driver, Elise who had been farming for 7-8 year, Rene who had been farming for 17 years, Julius who has been farming 6 years Lisi Crythantus who had been farming 4 years

Farmers

They brought up some of the following issues;

·         The youths have is that they don’t have any land to farm. The land that they use belongs to their parents who grow during the wet season so the only income they have is for 4 months in the dry season.

·         There is other land available but they will be in areas where there is no stream to bring water. This is where my project will come in we need to be able to provide access to water for these areas during the dry season so that more land can be used for farming.

·         Although they use fungaside and pesticides, but they have been having problems with insects damaging the ripe fruits, they think it’s white fly.

·         They say the soil is good but it is expensive to buy manure to fertilise the land and improve crop yields, this could be a good cross over point for Chris project as the human waste when treated can be used as a fertiliser. If you could install composting toilets in these compounds near the farms it could work out well.

·         They were all members of BASSUG the Bambui farmers association, this means that they get to share their knowledge about crops and issues. They have a meeting every week and they all said how useful they found it.

·         They also said they have a problem with the volume of water during the dry season as there is enough water but they can only water one farm at a time because there is not enough volume. I suspect there is a lot of water lost as the beds of the channels which are mainly just cut out from earth and they travel very far leading to absorption by the ground. Also there could be water lost by evaporation during the dry season.

·         They also were facing problems with the markets, they say that the transport of the crops they get damaged and it’s very expensive. Also although they have good quality products, the market is swamped with cheaper lower quality crops which people tend to buy meaning that they can’t sell all of their crops. They are interested in ways to preserve their crops or make use of the damaged crops.