Seminar Details

Furrows in the desert: Agricultural development project, northern Turkana, Kenya

Date

14/06/2018

Lecturers

Dr. Amit Eliyahu - The Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, Kibbutz Ketura; and The Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences in Eilat

Abstract

The Turkana People of north-western Kenya are nomadic pastoralists that experience difficulties in living according to their traditional life due to increasing frequencies of droughts and geopolitical changes. Growing numbers of families “in transition” are developing deep dependency on aid food, experiencing an increase in violent tribal conflicts over pastor and water resources and are pressured to migrate to urban slams. The Arava Institute for Environmental Studies (Israel), the Missionary Community of Saint Paul the Apostle (Spain & Kenya), and communities of Turkana People, came together to bring a positive change to the region. Furrows in the Desert (FID) is an agricultural development project that proves the viability of both self-subsistent and commercially oriented agriculture in Turkana to support food security in the area, to be a mean of livelihood for income generation, and to contribute to the local community resilience. FID’s model includes 5 months of training given at our central training and R&D farm and an on-going guidance provided at the graduates’ farms. Each graduate takes on two assistants that receive their training in the field and, after one year, start their own farm. Through FID, 123 Turkana graduated from 9 courses, 133 assistants were trained in the field, 163 farms (shambas) were established within 34 communities including 5 farming clusters, and 4 Turkana trainers and 8 Turkana assistant trainers joined the team of Israeli volunteers. On 18 December 2014 the first ever farmers association of turkana was established by the program participants. Israeli knowledge and experience in agriculture suitable for arid land is adopted to handle the extreme environmental conditions of the Turkana Desert. Scarce water supply is managed by a combination of runoff catchment dams, flood diversions to areas bounded by retention walls and solar or wind powered pumping systems installed over shallow to 80m deep boreholes. Water distribution is done by using Netafim’s family gravity-fed drip-irrigation system. Plant varieties and growing methods were tested to identify the appropriate plants to grow in places where water is saline and alkali or soil is alkali and heavy with clay minerals. In some locations we grow directly in the local soil and in others we grow in floating beds. The combination of relevant know-how, thorough training, on-going in-field guidance by experienced farmers, adaptive attitude, and close relationships with the local communities makes this model suitable for implementation in other parts of East Africa and in other semi-arid and arid lands around the world.

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