Kenyan farmers and animal fodder sellers are crossing borders into Tanzania in search of the milk-boosting calliandra.
Calliandra, a fodder tree ready for harvest in half a year, is highly sought after because it adds one liter of milk for every two kilograms of its leaves reducing the amount of expensive dairy meal farmers buy.
There is only one problem: both farmers and researchers are struggling to produce enough seeds because the tree produces little seeds and survives poorly, with only 30 percent of trees reaching maturity.
“Almost every day I field calls from Kenyan farmers looking for calliandra. Just two weeks ago, I got an order of 1,000 kilogrammes from Makerere University researchers in Uganda,” said Dr. Careen Biwott, a feed and nutrition expert at Kenyatta University.
The calliandra seeds take 24 hours from placing the order to reach Isibania at Kenya’s border with Tanzania and cost Sh3,000 a kilo.
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Between 2005 and 2012 USAID and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation marketed and distributed 3.8 tons of seeds and 500,000 seedlings of mainly calliandra and leucena fodder trees/shrubs to livestock keepers in the country.
The legacy of those projects, Doctor Careen pointed out, is still present today in the form of decades-old fodder shrubs and shrubs that germinated from their seeds on farms across the country.
“Most of the remaining trees are however leucaena which give animals about two per cent less protein. This is because, unlike calliandra which produces a small amount of flowers and seeds that are easily swept away by the wind, its pods burst and seeds pour on the ground and grow by themselves,” she said.
“Most livestock keepers buy leucaena seeds which are readily available in Kenya thinking they are calliandra. You can however easily tell them apart because calliandra seeds are greyish to dark while leucaena have a glossy red/brown colour.
Calliandra produces the most amount of ripe seed between April and May. According to the Forestry Research Program, seed-producing trees require a cool environment that has persistent mists at night. Excessive rainfall at night also reduces the release of pollen.
The shrub is also only pollinated by small bats and large moths.
To get calliandra to grow, you first need to break the seeds’ dormancy which makes them unable to germinate by soaking them in hot water, putting them in a fridge at three to five degrees for a week, or even submerging the seeds in inoculants such as Coca-Cola which breaks calliandra’s outside layer.
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While leucaena can survive in hot and humid climates with as little as 650 mm of rain, calliandra will perform best and produce seed at 1,000 to 4,000 mm of rain annually and annual temperatures of 22- 28°C. It can only handle a four-month dry season.
More than increasing milk output, calliandra also adds nitrogen to the soil and can be cropped next to other food crops, such as maize because it doesn’t take away nutrients from them.
Source: farmbizafrica.com
