Pay a visit to fresh fruit and vegetable markets and slaughter houses and you’ll see how much food get wasted daily. Unknown to many, these wastes can easily be converted to nutritious meal for pigs, poultry, goats, sheep, cows, rabbits, and fish by a process called lactic acid fermentation. All you need is a lactic acid bacteria, a source of fermentable carbohydrate and time. Don’t mind the complex names, you can easily get all of them.
Fruits, vegetables, fish and slaughter house wastes has very high water content and that makes them highly perishable. They can be treated in various ways but those ways can hardly compete with fermentation – they may be composted (time consuming), used in vermiculture (growing of earthworm) or biogas digesters (why use a valuable waste when you can use manure instead?) or fed directly to animals (they may contain pathogens and pesticides. There is
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Do you know that weeds can cause over 50% yield loss? Weed control is very important in every crop farm. The trick is to control weeds until your crops form a canopy that covers the land. This will prevent light from reaching weeds and they won’t grow fast enough to be a problem. The trick is not to totally eliminate weeds – you can’t achieve that in a large farm – but to frustrate their growth to the point where they’ll not cause yield loss.
Manual weeding is time consuming and painfully laborious. It is not practical to weed hectares of farmland by hand. That is why successful farmers are known to use chemical weed control. It is far cheaper than manual or mechanical weed control.
You may be wondering which safe herbicide to use in your cassava farm. Some people have learnt the hard way in the past when
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I have farmed cucumber twice. I started at a very small scale and then scaled up a little. This enabled me to learn the ropes and keep loss to a minimum. My first trial was a near disaster as diseases nearly wipe out everything. Second trial was better as I made a reasonable net profit (1.33 ROI but without including cost of fixed assets like knapsack sprayer, boot etc, ROI was about 2). Below are some of the things I learnt:
1. Humid Condition Attracts Diseases: I planted when the rainy season started. At the peak of rainfall when rain fall almost daily, disease struck. I suspects downy mildew. This disease first appear as yellow spots on the leaves which later turn brown. It expands and kill the whole leaves and the plants soon die. I knew little about fungicides when I started.
2. Fungicides are Important: I used mancozeb
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Weeding manually is very costly and labor-intensive. But with herbicides, weeding becomes easier. Below are herbicides you can use without killing your soybean crops.
Post Emergence Herbicides:
These are herbicides that kill weeds that have grown out from the soil. You can apply it to kill weeds before you start land preparation. See manufacturer’s label for dosage. Below are 2 post emergence herbicides you can use.
1. Glyphosphate: This is a systemic herbicides – meaning that it enters the weeds’ system and kill them completely. It kills both broadleaf and grass weeds. It will kill soybean but because it has no residual activity in the soil, you can use it before you plant soybean but not after. It acts slowly and takes about 2 weeks to kill weeds.
2. Paraquat: This is a contact herbicide because it kills the part of weed it comes in contact with. It does not
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When you get your day old chicks, it is important to do what is called “day old chick screening”. Day old chick screening has a lot of benefits that can save you from disaster. It helps you to know the right time to vaccinate your birds and tells you the right antibiotics to use.
Although there are established vaccination plans that will work for most people in an area, DOC screening is still important because Hatcheries can make mistakes. Some vaccination plans may tell you to vaccinate for Newcastle disease on day 7. But because of hatchery mistake, the chicks may actually need the vaccine on day 5 to prevent disaster. DOC screening will help you discover this.
Due to the cost of this screening (N7000 as of 2015), it may not be favorable to those who has less than 500 or 1000 chicks as the case may
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The Tumbukiza method, which originate from Kenya, has been known to improve grass yield (by about 2x) and drought tolerance. The grass will grow longer into the dry season before the leaves start dying off. This means that feed will still be available during part of the dry season. But with irrigation, dry season will lose its significance.
Tumbukiza MethodCourtesy of FAO.org
There are 2 types of Tumbukiza method: The round pit type and the rectangular pit type.
Round Pit Type: Dig a pit 60cm in diameter and 60cm deep, leaving 60cm space between the pits.
Rectangular Pit Type: Dig a pit 60cm deep and 60-90cm wide. The length of the pit will depend on the available land, but it should be as long as possible. Leave 90cm space between pits. Rectangular pits that are long make more economical use of land and are easier to
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If you’re looking for an organic and earth-friendly way to control insects in your farm or garden, neem seed extract is a very good choice to consider. It contains azadirachtin, the main active ingredient responsible for its pesticidal effects. Neem seeds come from the neem tree, a popular medicinal tree that originate from India. The tree can grow in Africa and in many other continents.
Some people get discouraged when they spray neem seed extract and nothing happen. They expect to see the insects die in masses within a few hours. But neem seed extract doesn’t work like that. It takes about a week to start seeing the effect.
Neem TreeImage Courtesy of sd-nl.com
How Does Neem seed extract Pesticide Works?
Neem extract will kill only insects that consume it. It is a hormone disruptor. Neem extract contains a lot of active ingredients that can disrupt
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Biogas is a gaseous green fuel that is produce when organic matters like animal manure and plant materials decay in an air-tight chamber called a biogas/anaerobic digester. Biogas contains mainly methane (CH4), carbon dioxide (CO2) and small percentage of hydrogen sulphide (H2S). In a world plagued by environmental, economic and health problems as a result of the use of fossil fuel, replacing fossil fuels with green fuels like biogas will help in alleviating these problems as follows.
1. Methane Capture: When piles of organic matter decay, they give off some methane into the atmosphere. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that is about 21 times more effective in trapping heat from the earth than carbon dioxide. This simply means that methane is 21x worse than CO2. Once released, methane can remain in the atmosphere for as long as 15 years!
Apart from carbon dioxide, methane is another gas that is
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If you have ever tried farming on a plot of land (120x60ft) or more, you’ll agree with me that weeding with hoes is no easy task. It is back- and waist-breaking! If you decide to employ laborers to help you out, they’ll charge you about N7000 per plot (depending on your location). This shows how important it is for you to find ways of cutting weeding cost. And that’s exactly what you’re about to learn.
So how do we go about this? The method we’re going to look at is called the stale seedbed method. Here is how it works. Make your seedbed, ridges or hills (I like working with ridges because it makes operations like fertilizer application or spraying insecticides and fungicides easier). After making your ridges, don’t sow your seeds or transplant yet. Allow about 2 weeks to pass to allow the first flush of weeds to grow.
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Pepper belongs to the Solanacea family. Other members of this family includes tomato, tobacco, eggplant and Irish potato. There are different varieties of pepper available to choose from. You just have to go to the pepper sellers in your area and find out the variety that sales well. Then visit a state ministry of Agric. and find out where you can buy the seeds. Some people who sell agro-chemicals in markets may also sell seeds.
Is there money to be made in pepper farming? Yes. Pepper mature in 3-4 months and with proper maintenance, you can harvest it continually for 6 months or more. You’ll make much more money if you have access to irrigation facilities so you can irrigate your plants during the dry season. This can either be in the form of borehole or stream/river. In most places in Nigeria, you can easily rent farmlands that are close
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