Success Stories
Improved Seed Variety vs Recycled Varieties
Farmers in Iramba have increased their understanding of the importance and advantages in using improved seeds. From the analysis it was obvious that there is a great disparity between the farmers understanding of the market requirements and the actual market requirements. While processors strive for sunflower variety with high oil content farmers on the other side are busy producing seeds varieties with the potential to fill the bags more easily during harvest. Te fact that no proper measurements such as weight are used has led to the use of bags with approximately 65 – 70 kgs. This misunderstanding has prolonged the poor productivity f sunflower; farmers keep on relying on recycled seeds while buyers are keen and willing to pay an extra shilling for seed varieties with more oil content such as the Kenya Fedha variety which is more suitable for processing.
RCCL has contributed by raising awareness and understanding about the importance of using improved seed variety. The introduction of the Kenya Fedha variety and emphasis on using the already known Record variety is one of the major outputs from RCCL. Furthermore RCCL has emphasized the use of quality sunflower seeds by creating direct linkages between farmers’ organizations and seed suppliers. It is therefore important to increase the production, distribution and awareness of quality seeds so that more farmers can move away from recycled to improved seeds, and therefore increase their productivity level. From experience quality seeds have the potential to increase productivity from five bags to 20 – 25 bags per acre, whilst the recycled seeds can only provide 5 bags per acre.
Access and utilization of appropriate and reliable inputs were the major challenges among sunflower producers. Farmers were very reluctant to search for quality seeds, while seed suppliers don’t tend to secure direct markets with farmers. RCCL has tried to create the linkages and luckily seed suppliers have seen the potential for market by dealing with farmers directly, this is also in line with securing reliable seeds form the fake ones.
Farmers in Iramba have increased their understanding of the importance and advantages in using improved seeds. From the analysis it was obvious that there is a great disparity between the farmers understanding of the market requirements and the actual market requirements. While processors strive for sunflower variety with high oil content farmers on the other side are busy producing seeds varieties with the potential to fill the bags more easily during harvest. Te fact that no proper measurements such as weight are used has led to the use of bags with approximately 65 – 70 kgs. This misunderstanding has prolonged the poor productivity f sunflower; farmers keep on relying on recycled seeds while buyers are keen and willing to pay an extra shilling for seed varieties with more oil content such as the Kenya Fedha variety which is more suitable for processing.
RCCL has contributed by raising awareness and understanding about the importance of using improved seed variety. The introduction of the Kenya Fedha variety and emphasis on using the already known Record variety is one of the major outputs from RCCL. Furthermore RCCL has emphasized the use of quality sunflower seeds by creating direct linkages between farmers’ organizations and seed suppliers. It is therefore important to increase the production, distribution and awareness of quality seeds so that more farmers can move away from recycled to improved seeds, and therefore increase their productivity level. From experience quality seeds have the potential to increase productivity from five bags to 20 – 25 bags per acre, whilst the recycled seeds can only provide 5 bags per acre.
Access and utilization of appropriate and reliable inputs were the major challenges among sunflower producers. Farmers were very reluctant to search for quality seeds, while seed suppliers don’t tend to secure direct markets with farmers. RCCL has tried to create the linkages and luckily seed suppliers have seen the potential for market by dealing with farmers directly, this is also in line with securing reliable seeds form the fake ones.
We expected the productivity of the new seed variety to be much more better that the normal varieties we use, looking at the plants which look much healthier compared to the plants from the recycled seeds. We are waiting until harvest but most likely we will shift from recycling seeds to using these improved varieties.
