Farmers cash in on tree seeds

Establishing seed orchards on farms and research stations in Malawi and Mozambique is overcoming a major challenge to up-scaling agroforestry by providing access to high quality tree seeds.

Atusaye Mwalwanda, Scaling-up Officer with the World Agroforestry Centre in Malawi, explains how smallholder farmers are being encouraged to grow seeds and work in groups to store them in Community Agroforestry Tree Seed (CATS) Banks.

“Not only does this ensure an ongoing supply of quality tree seeds, some farmers are earning much more from their seeds than they are from their traditional crops,” says Mwalwanda.

The trees are generally grown on short to medium term fallows of fertilizer tree species such as Sesbania sesban and Tephrosia candida. In the first year, particularly for rain-fed agriculture, farmers can intercrop with their preferred cereal crops such as maize, millet or sorghum. In the second year, the trees are left to grow by themselves purely to produce seed.

After the seeds are harvested, the trees can be felled and all leafy residues incorporated back into the soil as organic fertilizer. The woody materials are used for domestic fuel wood or sold.

As part of this project, farmers have been trained in basic husbandry including harvesting techniques, seed handling and marketing; ensuring they get good prices at market. Agroforestry seed such as Tephrosia candida are selling for US$ 1.5 per kilogram which is higher than what is currently being paid for cotton and tobacco.

On-station orchards, which are usually planted as pure stands, have the potential to produce high volumes of seed but there are significant establishment costs such as labor for land clearing, planting, weeding, harvesting, threshing and winnowing.

“Last season at one of the Centre’s orchards in Lilongwe we harvested close to four metric tons of seed from three hectares of Tephrosia vogelii,” explains Mwalwanda. “This seed is distributed free to farmers before the onset of rains.”