Potato farmers in Kenya increased their potato production by 30 percent simply by using tubers from selected healthy-looking plants as seed. The beauty of the technology, known as positive selection, is that it is easy to adopt by small scale farmers because it does not require any cash investment, just some sticks and labour.
The International Potato Center (CIP), the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) and the Ministry of Agriculture of Kenya have trained over 100 extension agents and farmer trainers. They in turn trained over 70 farmer groups involving more than 1000 farmers since 2004.
"The training was a real eye opener, we never knew that most of our potato plants were sick," said Michael Macharia, an extension worker trained as a trainer in May 2005. "This technology responds directly to the need of our potato farmers because they have no access to clean seed."
In Kenya, as well as in most developing countries, high quality seed potatoes are not available to small scale farmers. There are limited amounts of quality seed available for a few released varieties, but it is expensive. For popular landraces no seed is available. This makes farmers plant potatoes from their previous crop infected with diseases, resulting in low yields.
Farmers groups are being trained on distinguishing between sick and healthy plants by the trained extension staff. Healthy looking plants are pegged before flowering and monitored till harvest. Pegged plants are harvested one by one and a final seed potato selection is made based on the number, size and quality of the tubers. By repeating this process over a few seasons, yields can be gradually increased. The farmer groups see this for themselves because a field experiment compares their own method with positive selection.
"I have done positive selection for three seasons and it has doubled my yields," said Wainaina Njoroge, a member of Pagima group in the Naivasha division. "I expect to harvest 20 bags from this quarter acre (approximately 22 tonnes per hectare). Fellow farmers are now coming to me to buy seed as they have seen it is better than what they have."
"My last crop looked so good that thieves came during the night to harvest it," said Peter Kinyae from KARI in Tigoni. "Interestingly we have seen several cases of theft from fields where groups had planted positive selected seed. This is a good indicator that the technology works."
"The approach of teaching farmers positive selection is being further investigated by CIP to judge its potential for solving the seed problem in other developing countries," said Peter Gildemacher, a CIP potato specialist based in Nairobi. "Trials with farmers are on-going in Ethiopia and Uganda, as well as Peru and India and the technology is being promoted in Mozambique and Malawi. We are also developing a set of training materials from the experience in Kenya."
International Potato Center
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