Economics of Insecticide use and Potential for Bt Maize Varieties in the Control of Stalkborer in Kenya.

Maize is the staple food crop and source of income for majority of the Kenyan population and many sub-Saharan African countries. The increasing Kenyan population demands an increase in maize production if intermittent food deficits have to be averted. Since the introduction of improved maize varieties in mid-1960, the start of Green Revolution period, maize yields increased drastically up to 1970s and started declining from 1980s to-date. The key contributory factors are nutrient mining, sub-optimal input use and insect pest damage. Of the insect pests, stalk borer is of economic importance. Currently, KARI and CIMMYT are developing maize varieties that are tolerant to stalk borer damage. In order to evaluate the potential impact of these interventions economics of stalk borer control at farm level was evaluated. Surveys complemented with on-farm trials were executed in six major maize growing zones of Kenya. Farmers were randomly selected and a sample-frame established after which a total of 1854 households were randomly selected using random sampling technique. Each household was interviewed using structured questionnaire. Data on method of stalk borer control and the type insecticides used was collected. Partial budget and economic surplus models were used. The results indicated that very few farmers control stalk borer in maize despite significant stalk borer losses of about 15%. Therefore if Bt maize is introduced in Kenya it is likely to reduce these losses. This will benefit many hungry and poor Kenyans with improved household food supply and on farm incomes, in line with Government policy of food security and poverty eradication.Crop Production/Industries,

Ecological management of cereal stemborers in African smallholder agriculture through behavioural manipulation

1. Africa faces serious challenges in feeding its rapidly growing human population owing to the poor productivity of maize and sorghum, the most important staple crops formillions of smallholder farmers in the continent,with yields being among the lowest in the world. 2. A complex of lepidopterous stemborers attack cereals in Africa. However, their effective control is difficult, largely as a result of the cryptic and nocturnal habits of moths, and protection provided by host stem for immature pest stages.Moreover, current control measures are uneconomical and impractical for resource-poor farmers. 3. An ecological approach, based on companion planting, known as ‘push–pull’, provides effective management of these pests, and involves combined use of inter- and trap cropping systems where stemborers are attracted and trapped on trap plants with added economic value (‘pull’), and are driven away from the cereal crop by antagonistic intercrops (‘push’). 4. Novel defence strategies inducible by stemborer oviposition have recently been discovered, leading to the attraction of egg and larval parasitoids, in locally adapted maize lines but not in elite hybrids. We also established that landscape complexity did not improve the ecosystem service of biological control, but rather provided a disservice by acting as a ‘source’ of stemborer pests colonising the crop. 5. Here we review and provide new data on the direct and indirect effects of the push–pull approach on stemborers and their natural enemies, including the mechanisms involved, and highlight opportunities for exploiting intrinsic plant defences and natural ecosystem services in pest management in smallholder farming systems in Africa

Are structured value chains possible or necessary? some highlights from Ethiopian and Kenyan maize and legume markets

A core pillar of sustainable agricultural intensification is the farm level financial viability of such intensification. This will (almost surely) be mediated by well-functioning agricultural markets and value chains. This brief highlights four important principles for policy on value chain and for further research. The near absence of key elements of structured value chains in Ethiopian and Kenyan maize and legume markets imply limited profitable business opportunities in these more formalized market activities.8 page

Crop-livestock interactions in smallholder farming systems and their implications for the adoption of Conservation Agriculture in Kenya

This study was conducted as part of the project titled: ‘Enhancing Total Farm Productivity in Smallholder Conservation Agriculture-Based Systems in Eastern Africa’. Its purpose is to inform agronomists and other project partners on the existing crop and livestock production setups in the project intervention sites and to help determine to what extent the interaction between crop and livestock subsystems could potentially facilitate or hinder the adoption of conservation agricultural practices. A number of institutions and individuals contributed in various ways in the production of this baseline information and deserve acknowledgement. The authors would thus like to acknowledge EU-IFAD for funding the project, the Kenyan Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KARLO)-Embu and Kakamega Centers for facilitating the overall implementation of the study, which involved household and community surveys on which this report is based. The authors also acknowledge the contributions of respondent farmers in providing the necessary data gathered during the survey process, Ministry of Agriculture staff for logistic support and the enumerators for their commitment in data collection.23 page