# 67 Rainwater is not seeping in‪.‬ New Ventures Podcast

Years of repeated tilling the same piece of land with a hand

hoe has compacted the soil in Malawi into a hard layer.

Plant roots cannot penetrate this “hard pan” and they grow

laterally, instead of vertically. Rainwater does not penetrate

the soil either but rushes along the furrows created in the

land, washing away the top soil. This is drastically reducing

agricultural production plummeting Malawi, whose

youthful population is dependent on agriculture, into crisis.

Climate crisis is making things worse. There are heavy

periods of rain, followed by dry spells and more frequent

cyclones. Standing crops are swept away and heavy rain

exacerbates soil erosion. Spells of drought makes plants,

already deprived of soil moisture, wither.

The solution is simple. Break down the hard pan of the soil.

Create deep beds and plant the crops there so that they are protected from storms. Rainwater seeps into the soil so that the soil has enough moisture during droughts. Tiyeni, a

local Malawi NGO has been training farmers on this

technique of “deep bed farming” for more than a decade.

They work with government extension workers who in turn

work with lead farmers who demonstrate these techniques

to other farmers.. Some of them have quadrupled their

yields. Tiyeni has worked with 30,000 farmers across the

county.

It does not cost too much money to train farmers. Isaac

Chavula feels that with about 450 million Malawian

Kwachas (less than US$ 300k) they can cover a lot of the

country. He also thinks it is a “lot of money”. That is

because funding for Tiyeni has been hard to come by – the

funding they get is from projects they do with universities

or companies. They are partnering with SIWI to raise the

profile of rainfed farming. Most of Sub-Saharan Africa’s

land is not irrigated. Governments have too little money to

invest in large irrigation projects. If all farmers in Malawi

could adopt deep bed farming, there may not be need to

spend a lot of money either in solving the looming problem

of food security.



Sections

Section 1: First 20 minutes introduction to the problem of agriculture in Malawi and the solution to the problem , Deep Bed Farming

Section 2: Next 23 minutes on what needs to be done so

that Malawi farmers have access to the solution.

Host: Sanjoy Sanyal, Founder Regain Paradise

Website www.regainparadise.org

Guest : Isaac Monjo Chavula, Country Director, Tiyeni

Kasonde Mulenga, Programme Manager, SIWI



Guests Website and contact

details. https://www.tiyeni.org/

isaacmonjo.chavula@tiyeni.org

https://siwi.org/

kasonde.mulenga@siwi.org