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Innovation Lab For Small Scale Irrigation

Innovation Lab For Small Scale Irrigation

Innovation Lab For Small Scale Irrigation

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water resources

Pail lifter, drip irrigation & conservation agriculture technologies

March 31, 2016 by matt.stellbauer

Water is scarce in Africa.  In Ethiopia, women get water from a shallow well like the picture on the right by throwing a pail with a rope, and then manually lifting the pail. The water is used for multiple purposes one of which is irrigation.  The task is very taxing to the woman’s body.  A team of engineers from Bahir Dar University and North Carolina A&T State University, funded by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Small Scale Irrigation (ILSSI), designed a simple ‘Pail Lifter’ shown on the left picture.   Water is lifted from a pail using a ‘Pail Lifter’ and then stored in a tank.  ‘Pail Lifter’ eases the drudgery of lifting water just with a string, and minimizes well contamination because the rope is wrapped on the lifter and is not lying on the ground or touched by human hands.  From the tank, water is distributed to the field using a drip irrigation system.  Although the ‘Pail Lifter’ was mainly designed to fetch water for irrigation; eventually women used it to fetch water for livestock and home use.  Because of provision of irrigation, two villages that barely produces vegetables have women enabled to produced onions, garlic and tomatoes in 0.01 ha fields beside their homes.  For garlic and tomato, average harvests were 28 kg and 97 kg, respectively per 0.01 ha, with about 34% of the tomato consumed by the household and 66% were sold.  This is a welcome source of income to women who just began to grow vegetables.   Conservation agriculture production was compared with conventional practice.  Conservation agriculture involved no-tillage, continuous organic residue mulch, and diverse species rotation.  For garlic, average yield was 17 kg for conservation agriculture and 11 kg for conventional; for tomatoes it was 58 kg for conservation agriculture and 38 kg for conventional.  Water use in conservation agriculture system was 16% less than the conventional system.  The team is optimistic that as the women become more familiar with conservation agriculture, water use will be even lower than the current 16% water savings.

An encouraging success story is from a young and newly married woman commercial vegetable home gardener for privacy we will call Eme.  Emetestified that with the help of her husband together they produced 240 kg of tomato from a 0.01 ha land near her home.  Sixty-seven percent (160 kg) of tomatoes were harvested from conservation agriculture plots and 33% (80 kg) were harvested from conventionally tilled plots.  She sold about 210 kg of tomato and the rest, 30 kg, have been consumed by their household and provided to relatives and friends for free, a common culture in Ethiopia.  While tomato was being harvested, she prepared foods from tomato once every three days stating that tomato helped her to diversify their daily food improving her family’s nutrition.  She made about 1300 Birr ($65) from selling tomato.   As newly married couple, they were able to pay house utilities and able to save money in a bank.  She had learned that the drip system saved her time and drudgery of irrigating vegetables than doing it manually. This gave her more time to care for her six months old baby.  She also learned that mulching saves water and increases productivity. So, they are planning to apply mulch for their other vegetables and coffee plants. 

Pail lifter, drip irrigation and conservation agriculture studies are just a year old, ILSSI is optimistic as more training is provided and as protocols are improved because of experience gained by women, the number of vegetables grown per year will increase from at least once to four times a year, increasing income, empowering women and diversifying diets of Ethiopian households.

Article by: Manuel Reyes

Shallow well. Photo by Manuel Reyes

Pail Lifter. Photo by Amalake Ameru Jembere

Drought: Solutions for Ethiopia

January 4, 2016 by matt.stellbauer

ILSSI takes on extreme drought in Ethiopia

Populations have been displaced across Ethiopia, many resorting to migration across national borders in search of food and grazing lands that have begun to die off as a result of one of the world’s worst droughts in decades. El Niño weather patterns in 2015 have brought additional water scarcity as the Ethiopian government and others across the globe scramble to find solutions to alleviate the situation, according to international media.

The United States Government in December 2015 announced a contribution of $88 million to help feed the country’s hungry. Ethiopia has requested more than $1 billion in international aid to help feed its populous, according to major media outlets.

It is under these conditions that the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Small-Scale Irrigation (ILSSI) works to find solutions that would give farmers the ability to produce food sustainably while conserving evermore precious water resources.   

“The people of these countries are in increasingly dire conditions as precipitation becomes scarcer and scarcer,” said ILSSI Director Neville Clarke of Texas A&M AgriLife’s Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture. “We chose Ethiopia as one of our countries of operation roughly three years ago because we have known about the extreme water scarcity in this region for quite some time.”

The goal of ILSSI, which also conducts research in Ghana and Tanzania, is to seek irrigation solutions that are viable in terms of environmental sustainability, economics and production quality.

The project uses numerical equations, or modeling systems, to predict the viability prospective technologies and practices. Another initiative focuses on training in-country scientists to use the models for broader implementation across the country and continent.

“We can plug data into the models on farm, watershed and regional scales to see if the tools we want to try have a good chance of being viable,” Clarke said.

Technologies and practices that have been modeled and subsequently placed into physical field tests have included manual well-water extraction tools, mechanical pumps and weather monitoring systems.

Once tools are found to be viable for use as water-saving implements in field trails, they can be implemented on a broader scale across the region. 

“The urgency for us to find success in this effort has increased to an all-time high, Clarke said. “These people are in dire need and we’re looking for solutions now.”

Water access and nutrition security

April 8, 2015 by matt.stellbauer

How can reliable water access contribute to nutrition security in Africa south of the Sahara?

The following blog story was written by Laia Domènech, visiting fellow in the Environment and Production Technology Division at IFPRI, in honor of World Water Day 2015. The theme of this year’s event on March 22 is “Water for Sustainable Development.”

A set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are expected to be adopted in September 2015 by the UN General Assembly. In advancing the 2015 Millennium Development Goals, the SDGs call for action from both developing and developed countries to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture (SDG2) as well as promote sustainable water management (SDG6). Although SDG2 and SDG6 are not linked in the current post-2015 development agenda framework, multiple benefits might be achieved and tradeoffs reduced if both water supply and agricultural water are managed in direct support of improved nutrition, particularly in chronically food-insecure countries and in Africa south of the Sahara.

IFPRI Discussion Paper: Is Reliable Water Access the Solution to Undernutrition? 

Globally, an estimated 805 million people are chronically undernourished, many of them in Africa south of the Sahara (SSA), where 329 million also lack access to improved water supply and 640 million do not have access to an improved sanitation facility. The linkages between water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) and nutrition have long been recognized. Poor WASH is considered a leading cause of diarrhea, nematode infections, and other conditions such as environmental enteropathy, which is caused by frequent intestinal infections and has received renewed attention in recent years.

Water is also an essential resource for growing food, and water scarcity is a major… Read more here

Study: ‘Garden kits’ could help home gardens provide food security

March 23, 2015 by matt.stellbauer

Garden kits that pay specific attention to small-scale irrigation might hold the key to stronger food security for smallholder farmers of ILSSI project countries.

Still, a new study recommends an approach to building better home gardens that considers many contributing factors including: building on current farming practices, examining the roles of men, women and children in gardening, calculating current productivity of gardens, examining how produce is used, examining current water management practices and problems and taking into account farmers’ perceptions of their gardens’ viability.       

The study also looks at home garden/irrigation kits that have been used in the past and what aspects of those examples have shown success.

Click to read the full paper here.

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