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Dudutech awarded funding for beans research from Agri-Tech Catalyst Fund Round 5

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Project title: Improving consistency of yields and quality of large-scale and smallholder bean production in Kenya by precision management of soil, water and pathogens

The fresh vegetable industry forms a vital part of Kenya’s economy. Kenyan growers export around 60,000 tonnes of fine and runner beans each year, worth £385M at retail sales value, with the UK receiving around 50% of the supply. A consortium made up of Flamingo Horticulture – Dudutech Division, Provenance Partners Ltd (UK), Vegpro Ltd (Kenya), NIAB EMR (UK) and WeatherQuest Ltd (UK) received funding for 3 years as part of the UK’s Agri-Tech Catalyst scheme. The project will deliver new science, technology, knowledge and training to accelerate sustainable intensification of large- and small-scale bean production in Kenya. Work on the project, which started in October 2016 and is to be completed by September 2019, focusses on:

  1. Developing and adapting irrigation infrastructure, scheduling tools and weather probability forecasting to improve soil water management, yields and consistency of quality;
  2. Quantifying the effects of soil water availability and continuous cropping on the incidence and severity of soil pathogens targeting bean crops;
  3. Identifying the effects of novel biocontrol agents on the soil/rhizosphere microbiome to guide the optimum combination of treatments;
  4. Adopting integrated biocontrol to improve yields, quality and shelf-life;
  5. Promoting and disseminating the benefits of precision irrigation and biocontrol via outgrower workshops led by Vegpro and Dudutech;
  6. Assessing the economic and social impacts of project outputs and developing and implementing extension services to outgrowers.

At the end of this project, the consortium expect to deliver a 12% increase in average yield and a 20% reduction in wasted crop, in order to increase food and job security and enhance soil management skills among Kenyan growers.

Agrichemicals and ever more intensive farming will not feed the world

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The Guardian

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The latest frontier is Africa, where there is a new scramble to spread the agroindustrial model of farming. It may well be in Africa, however, that a different, more ecological vision of the food future emerges. I had a glimmer of it on a trip to a large-scale horticultural export company based on Kenya’s Lake Naivasha.

The company, Flamingo Homegrown, has abandoned its long and heavy use of chemical pesticides, partly in response to a campaign highlighting their effect on workers’ health, but partly too in recognition that they were on a losing treadmill of spraying and pest resistance.

They have reinvented their agriculture in a way that makes the science of agrochemical use look as primitive as a blunderbuss. Instead they employ groups of highly trained African scientists to study and reproduce in labs the fungi and microrrhizae in healthy soil that form intricate links with plant roots. Rather than waging chemical war on the land, they are working to harness its immensely complex ecosystems. They have built vast greenhouses dedicated to breeding and harvesting ladybirds to control pests biologically rather than chemically.

There is an another route to food security – and it is the polar opposite of three agrochemical giants bestriding the world.

• This article was amended on 3 October 2016. An earlier version referred to glyphosphate; that has been corrected to glyphosate.