Initiative to woo farmers back to cashew nuts

Empowering Farmers Foundation Program Manager Mathew Jilani (Center) shows visitors a cashew nut seedling at a Cashew nut tree nursery in Matsangoni area, Kilifi County.

It has scaled up the project to incorporate 12,500 farmers from five other wards: Watamu, Dabaso, Kakuyuni, Tezo, and Ganda, where cashew nut seedlings are being distributed to achieve a target of one million cashew nut trees in the next two months.

"We were stranded after the cashew nut industry went down, forcing many people to cut down the trees, but EFF came to our rescue. They first came with experts who examined the few old cashew nut trees that gave us poor yields, and they pruned and sprayed them. After a short period, the trees started producing again," said Ms. Juma.

The mother of four said towards the end of 2021, EFF started training farmers on the best agroforest practices and climate change resilient agriculture and introduced a new variety of cashew nut seedling known as polyclonal together with the moringa tree and millet for intercropping.

She added: "They told us that the new variety was drought-resistant and could be intercropped with other drought-resistant crops such as millet and moringa, whose seedlings were given out to farmers."

Empowering Farmers Foundation Program Manager Mathew Jilani

He indicated that some companies had set bases in Kilifi to process cashew nuts but getting enough raw materials is a problem due to the scarcity of the nut.

According to EFF Lucas Mithole, the EFF Project director at Matsangoni, the organization trains selected farmers who then train more farmers across the villages.

"We train lead farmers who in turn train more farmers deep in the villages," he said.

The ETG Climate Solutions Global head, Ilya Tyuvildin said that the programme will go on until farmers in the entire county are empowered.

"We spent close to two years researching the various program types and agro-forestry systems that we could potentially be deploying, and it was essential to properly prepare and have the right information at hand. Once that information was available, we were able to start pilot projects," he said.

According to him, the demand for cashew nuts in the global market was huge.