In Oku Ekuna means beans; Mucuna means Kevin's beans

   Something a little more ag related today. One of the requirements for organic certification is that a farmer can demonstrate that they are actively trying to improve the fertility of their soil. Farmers here in Oku don’t have a really strong grasp of nutrient cycling and the importance of replenishing all the nutrients that you take away from the farm during harvest. This makes sense when you consider the traditional strategy for tackling this problem in this part of the world was to practice shifting agriculture. Rather than managing a plot of land for long-term production when a grower saw that their yields were declining they’d move on to a new piece of land and let the exhausted plot regenerate, maybe over a few decades. Enter population pressure and perennial crops like coffee and this strategy is no longer viable.

   Chemical fertilizers are one solution to this problem (the solution of choice in many parts of the world) but not if you want to be an organic grower. When we are going around discussing organic practices with farmers we usually give them a list of input options for improving or maintaining soil fertility including compost, animal manure, and green manure (what we call green plants with good nutrient content). My personal favorite of these options is green manure coming in the form of cover crops. Compost is excellent, but requires quite a bit of labor. Also, with the piecemeal nature of many farming activities here it is hard to find a time when there is enough material available to make a good sized compost pile. Most of the suggestions about using animal manure come from parts of the world where animal manure is so abundant that it can actually become a nuisance. While there are quite a lot of goats and chickens around Oku, they are usually allowed to wander freely enough that collecting their manure is a lot of work and not a no-brainer solution.

Some mucuna seeds about to be planted.

   So cover crops: they grow exactly where you want to use them and if you choose the right species, can provide an impressive amount of nitrogen. The other benefits we hope to gain from a good cover crop are weed suppression and high biomass production. Finally, a good cover crop is going to be easy to maintain, easy to propagate, and will grow well in the shade of a coffee field. To this end, I picked up a couple of kilograms of Mucuna pruriens seed the last time I was in Bamenda. Mucuna has a good reputation as a companion crop for coffee, meeting almost all the criteria listed above. My greatest concerns are with the easy to maintain and nitrogen fixing points. Mucuna is a type of bean (aka velvet bean) and I’m worried that it could become a nuisance if it has a tendency to climb the stems of the coffee plants. Of course, if it also accomplishes weed suppression it may be a welcome trade-off to detach climbing mucuna in place of weed clearing.

   Nitrogen fixing is a concern because, as far as I know, mucuna has not been established here in Oku before. This can be a problem because in order for a nitrogen fixing plant to accomplish that task it needs to form an association with a specific type of soil bacteria (one species of bacteria to each species of plant). If the bacteria that mucuna works with is present, then we’re in luck, but if not then we’ll miss out on that benefit. We could potentially ameliorate that situation by bringing in some of that bacteria and inoculating the seed before sowing, but let’s hope we don’t need to do that.

   Right now I’m trying to find two farmers who are willing to try growing this mucuna in their farm. I don’t want to hand out lots of small amounts of seed because I don’t think anyone will gain much from that kind of experience. Also, to try to increase the person’s commitment to these plants, I’m asking that they pay 2,000 F for about a kilogram, which is half of what I paid in Bamenda. It would be nice to find farms with fences in place so that we can protect the mucuna from goats as it is being established, but I’m not going to be such a stickler on this point. One of our farmer partners has already stepped up and planted his seeds this past weekend, but finding a second is taking a little more effort. With the dry season approaching, I’d like to get these seeds in the ground as soon as possible so that they can be well established before they have to deal with that stress. I’m excited to see how this little project pans out and will certainly give updates as things develop.