COMPOSTING





Composting Increases Yields

Sue Edwards 






The world's largest single study of its kind now shows that composting increases yields two to three-fold and outperforms chemical fertilizers by more than 30 percent.

Despite Ethiopia's status as one of the least developed countries in the world, traditional agricultural production is highly diverse and is the main source of food for the population. Agriculture accounts for more than 75 percent of total exports, over 85 percent of employment; and about 45 percent of the GDP (gross domestic product).

The Government has stated that Ethiopia's development has to be based on its capacity to produce agricultural products to ensure food security for its population, provide the raw materials for agro-industrial development and earn foreign exchange. This is set out in “: Building on Progress — A Plan for Accelerated and Sustained Development to End Poverty (PASDEP) (2005/06-2009/10).

In 1995, Dr Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher, founder of the Institute for Sustainable Development (ISD), was asked by some government officials to design a project that could help farmers trying to eke out an existence on the highly degraded land of the highlands. The aim was to help the farmers use an ecological approach with a minimum of external inputs to improve the productivity of their land and rehabilitate their environments. The project started in 1996 as a partnership with the Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Development (BoARD) of Tigray, and is still continuing to be run by the BoARD.

Project activities in four communities were established in 1996/97 and 1997/98. Since 2000, there has been a rapid scaling up of the project so that by 2006, ISD was following up project activities in 57 local communities in 12 of the 53 weredas in Tigray.

In 2006, the FAO Natural Resources Department provided funding to help collect additional yield data from plots in farmers' fields during the 2006 harvesting season, and pay for the entry and statistical analysis of the data. The final database included plot yields from 974 farmers' fields and 13 crops taken over the years 2000 to 2006 inclusive. The results were presented at the FAO International Conference on   Organic Agriculture and Food Security  held 2-5 May 2007 in FAO, Rome .

This is now the single largest study of its kind in the world comparing yields from the application of compost and chemical fertilizer in farmers' fields. The results show without any doubt that compost can replace chemical fertilizers and increase yields by more than 30 percent on average.

Compost gives the highest yields for all crops; typically double those of the ‘check', and better than those from chemical fertilizer by an average of 30.1 percent (from 17.8 percent for faba bean to 47.4 percent for wheat).

There were many other positive impacts of composting. Soon, farmers began to observe and appreciate the residual effect of compost in maintaining soil fertility for two or more years. They are thus able to rotate the application of compost on their fields and do not have to make enough to apply to all their cultivated land each year.

Composted fields are able to retain more moisture than untreated fields or those treated with chemical fertilizer, so that when there are dry periods, composted crops continue to grow. This was seen dramatically in 2002 when the main rains were very poor and stopped early. Crops in composted fields were still green when those in check and especially chemically fertilized fields had withered and died.

Sue Edwards is director of the Institute of Sustainable Development in Addis Ababa , and has been involved in the Tigray Project from its inception

Source:  http://www.i-sis.org.uk/GEFSEP.php