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Benedetta's Story
Alexandra Oatham from Excellent UK talks to Benedetta Muthama about what she has achieved through her work with Excellent Development.
South East Kenya has not received enough rain for the last two years and farmers here have not had decent harvests since early 2007. This combined with high food prices and maize shortages have left many families struggling for food. But in spite of the current difficulties, food security is starting to improve for the farmers working with Excellent Development. Benedetta Kuama Muthama is 62 years old. She lives with her husband, her 11 children and 6 grandchildren. As well as caring for her large family she also manages a sprawling farm of some 25 hectares and sits on the committee of the Munathi Self Help Group. Working with Excellent Development Kenya field staff to improve the productivity of her farm has had a real impact. She tells me “Before working with Excellent Development I only planted maize, beans and cowpeas. From this my usual harvest was roughly 80 bags of maize and 9 bags of cowpeas”. By contrast, this year Benedetta has already managed to harvest 100 bags maize, 15 bags cow peas, 9 bags pearl millet, 10 bags sorghum and 2 bags dolichos, in spite of the drought. Stopping only briefly to demonstrate with equal measures of skill and glee how she scares bats away from her sorghum with a sling shot, Benedetta walks me around her farm and talks about the changes she has made in the few years she has worked with Excellent Development. Instead of relying on just the three crops she used to plant, Benedetta has succeeded in diversifying. She now plants a combination of drought resistant crops such as sorghum, pigeon peas, cassava, cow peas, finger millet, pearl millet and dolichos, all of which fare much better than the water-dependent maize that this year failed so dramatically throughout the region. To further increase her chances of a good harvest Benedetta has dug 3ft deep trench-like terraces down the length of her farm. Loss of valuable, nutritious top soil is often cited as one of the greatest threats to African food security and this simple, but labour intensive, process of terracing farmland can significantly reduce the problem enabling farmers to grow much more food. “The biggest change I made is terraces. Through the community exchanges and working with Excellent, I learned that I needed to dig much bigger terraces than I had dug before to stop the soil being washed away when the rains do come” she tells me, pointing to the 90km of deep new terracing that she and her husband dug between April and December last year. Described by her fellow community members as the group’s best terracer, Benedetta’s hard work is very plain to see and has clearly has paid off. Along these terraces she points out the various trees already bearing fruit: oranges, lemons, custard apples, mango and papaya as well as Melia volkensii, a medicinal tree which she uses for timber, fodder for her animals, and to make organic pesticides. Close to the terraces she has planted sweet potatoes, watermelons and pumpkins and has also planted a small patch of cotton shrubs, a cash crop that she can sell for 20 Shillings a Kilo. Throughout the farm she uses water from the nearby sand dam to irrigate her crops. I ask whether some of her crops have been affected by the drought too? “Yes. My beans crop failed and the maize harvest was smaller than I expected. But other farmers who only planted maize suffered much more. Thanks to the changes I made, I now have enough food to eat, feed my family and I don’t need to buy any food at the market.”
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