A Global Service Corps Sustainable Agriculture Success Story

  Editors note: The Kitomaris are a Tanzanian family who learned about bio-intensive agriculture through training provided by Global Service Corps sustainable agriculture program.

The Kitomaris have six children, which they will struggle to put through school. In recent years the imperative of intensification has increased as farm sizes have become smaller through passing parcels to children. Few families live in traditional houses, and family sizes are getting smaller. This imperative has caused the Kitomaris to become fully converted to bio-intensive agriculture. Behind the Kitomari farmstead is a garden with eight large compost piles 2×1 meters square. Here, the Kitomaris share the secret of their success, and the reason they get so many visitors. In 2002, with the help of Global Service Corps volunteers, they learned to make compost and how to utilize it in ‘deep dug beds.

“We were so amazed to see what a difference the compost and deep-dug vegetable beds made in our farm. We stopped using chemicals. We soon had too many vegetables and our neighbors began to come to buy from us in the dry season when they had no gardens. This was the start of a small revolution on our farm.”

Soon their farm had drawn the interest of visitors from Heifer International, and the Kitomaris became farmer motivators in fish and goats. The latter helped them to increase their compost-making to much more than they needed on their small farm, so they began to sell it!  How strange that anyone would make a business of selling compost, but at Tsh 20,000 per pile it has proven to be a good income generator.

The Nambala neighborhood now knows that they can get advice if they want to dig their own deep-dug vegetable beds. While at first, it seems like a lot of hard work Mr. Kitomari says, “once the beds are established, they last for three years without re-plowing, and they don’t stop producing. We follow one crop with another and they use so little water compared to our old system.”

Using the techniques taught by Global Service Corps, the Kitomaris have seven beds which produce abundant green vegetables for their meals, and they sell green, organic vegetables to their neighbors all through the year!

 Photo: Mr. Kitomari on his families farm