The Chereponi Farming Project started a new expansion phase at the beginning of March. Despite challenges, the first important milestone has been reached. Now it is time to wait for the rain.

The first milestone of the Chereponi Farming Project has been reached: The preparatory measures are almost complete. In Nansoni, the project site, a new tractor, trailer, disc harrow and cultivator are now ready for use. We were also able to order 260 tons of lime, most of which has already been delivered.

In the past few weeks, our partner organization, the Farming Development Organization, also concluded a memorandum of understanding with all participating farmers, which serves as a basis for cooperation. In addition, all fields of the participating farmer families have been surveyed and mapped. This is crucial in order to be able to provide the necessary quantities of lime, fertilizer and seed. And, as it turned out, it is absolutely necessary.

The 2020 pilot project already showed that the success of the harvest depends on the coordinated measures. ©Sabab Lou

We are talking about the same thing, but we don’t mean the same thing

Right at the beginning of the project in early March, we were confronted with a challenge: The actual size of the fields and the associated distribution of lime, fertilizer and seed proved to be different from the farmers‘ measurements. To them, a field is an acre, regardless of actual size. However, an acre is 0.4 hectares in our understanding. And different fields need adjusted measures. To prevent any misunderstanding, the project manager had the fields measured on site. It turned out that the actual size varied between 0.4 and 1.3 hectares per field. The realization was that although we are all talking about the same thing, we don’t mean the same thing.

The big challenge now was to convince all the farmers of the necessity of the exact measurements without ignoring them in the reality of their lives. Our project manager was the crucial interface and managed to convince the group.

Now that everything is prepared, it is time to wait for the rain so that they can start.