Farming with compost in Africa

my name is Dorothy jordu and i want to show you what i've been doing to produce quality compost in ghana here we do this on a large scale here but for any farmer you can be a small-scale farmer medium scale farmer you can be a big scale farmer all you need is your waste for your comfort it doesn't necessarily need to be very big this is the waste that is used as raw material for the compost and it comes from blue skies blue skies is an algo processing company that processes fruits into fruit salads and fruit juices and you can see from the waste we have some pineapple we have some two more and we have some mango peels all mixed together I want to show you the other ingredients we used in our compost this is from pineapple is crown pineapple crown we have the cardboard here we have our wood shavings here then we have a poetry manual as well all mixed together in a pile form to give us a compost pile if your materials are both wet and dry then put your dry materials down first and then the wet materials will be on top of the dry materials so that the dry materials can absorb the moisture from the wet materials putting in different ingredients as you are bringing together microorganisms from different different sources all mixed together and it gives you a very rich compost at the end of the whole process okay so you have your different materials for your compost and we've turned them all into the mixture now what is next is you need something to accelerate their breaking down of the tissues that is called a static or accelerator like what we have here but if you don't have that one don't worry it means you just need to chop your materials into smaller sizes so that they can break down faster and you have your compost within a shorter time now our mixture will take between two to three months to be fully matured for families however within that two to three months there are things you have to do and that include turning the mixture from time to time to beat out the stale air in the pile and to beat in fresh air and also by turning you re distributing the microorganisms that break down the tissues of your raw materials if you have a small heap you turn it by hand with your spade or shovel and if you have a lot of heap like what we have here you use the tenon machine and again you have to monitor to see that your mixture is not very dry so from time to time you can sprinkle very little water on your pile the pile should be heating up if the pile is not heating up you need to add more dry materials and if your pile is heating up too much you need to put in more green materials so here we are already compost which is sweet-smelling just like ordinary earth ready for farm use and my colleague show you how it is used on the farm fleeing on what my colleague Dorothy showed you about making compost I'm here to talk about what we do with this same compost on the first of the farmers my name is Shakespeare Joe Couto and I'm in charge of research and experimentation at blue skies we have been trying to help the farmers beat down cost because when Emily was introduced md2 is another variety of pineapple they compel the farmers to use a planted on plastics because it's not a resistant to drought us our look a variety the Spokane but with Campos we'll be able to prove that it can be planted on the bare floor using compost saves the farmers lots of money because money dad here at where I'm used to buy plastics are used for other things to help alleviate some financial presence besides we all know that plastics find it very difficult to Dickie and it was you save the environment when we bring the compost reform we apply it in between the plants so maybe I'll just show you what we do the way the blood was extracted will hinder the compost from leaving the room so it's very simple placing the compost on top of the soil next to the plant then the soil microbes now work it into the soil as did this password the other thing we do the compost is we brew what we call the compost tea now the compost it putting sucks and then we mess it in water and the microbes or the nutrients in the compost sip slowly into the water and that takes between seven and ten days and after that we take it out stay whatever we've gotten out of the compost and then apply it to the plants now it helps the plant one to resist diseases two to resist drought when it is really dry we drench the plant actually with a compost liquid we don't spray on the leaves in the longer we spray on the leaves only when that water is conducive and there is some degree of moisture in as well as you can see in conclusion I'd like to say that the best thing to do is to introduce compost into your farming systems we are benefited a lot from it if I tell you what this plants have gone through without compost urine toxin them as visible as they are and we would like to advise all farmers both men and women to incorporate compost into the farming systems and to benefit from it maybe even better than we in Ghana so you see from the waste gathered on your farm or from your processing what you can put it into and then the results it will give you on your farm out of the produce so for the leaf farmer composting should always be the best form of reusing the waste created on your farm you

Channel: Green Shoots

Views: 80,224

Keywords: FRICH, compost, green shoots productions, farm, farm compost, africa, Ghana, pineapple, 'Export, horticulture, in, Africa', 'pineapple, farming', 'Blue, Skies, Ghana', 'sustainable, agriculture', 'processed, fruit', 'compost, making', 'FRICH, fund', 'farm, business, management', 'using, waste', fertiliser, Fertilizer, LEAF

Id: yM0HMl3qWHA

Length: 8min 7sec (487 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 16 2012