Good work is under way in all three countries, and they are focusing in different ways depending on their needs for IPM research and outreach capacity. The most important effort that is underway is the development of relationships among researchers and research groups within and among countries. This is critical for the future capacity of IPM in these countries. The Tanzania group has the most activity in developing new technologies, i.e. novel botanical extracts for tomato leaf-miner, anaerobic disinfestation for soil-borne pathogens, finding new disease-resistant rootstocks, identifying thrips tolerance/resistance in onion varieties. The intention is that successful technologies will be scaled up in the third year of the project. The Kenya group is more focused on outreach to new groups of farmers who have recently joined together for farming and marketing. They are using fairly established IPM technologies, and have been successful in getting farmers to adopt them. The emphasis for year three will be on expansion of this effort, along with continued work on some novel biological products. The Ethiopian group has taken the longest to get started. This is due to several factors: unfamiliarity with management of the funding approach, internal political issues that inhibited communication networks, and the fall armyworm crisis that pulled entomologists away from vegetable IPM efforts. Nevertheless, they have field work underway and three MS students engaged in research, and are planning to host the project’s annual meeting in 2018.
On-farm participatory trials combined with training in technologies evaluated were very effective for advancing IPM approaches. Farmers training and hands-on experience in pest and disease diagnostics and some basic epidemiology can easily lead to a reduction in pesticide usage, more yield of high quality produce, and increased income. Part of the reason why farmers use so many pesticides is because the agro-chemical dealers are the advisor even though they are not trained on safe use or environmental impact of pesticides. Participatory on-farm research (by researchers and farmers) proved to be an effective approach to technology dissemination and adoption. Raising seedlings in germination trays with soil-less media such as peat moss and coco-peat produced healthy seedlings and plants that withstood pest pressure. Plant nutrition and water management remain problems to be investigated further. Through Whatsapp and email, seedling producers are working among themselves and with experts to resolve these issues.
Travels to the tomato-producing village of Mlali Tanzania, for example, revealed a marketing system where villages specialize in one crop to the near exclusion of other crops. This system favors the produce buyers and haulers. They know which villages to visit to purchase tomatoes, which for onion, eggplant, potatoes etc. This means there is little diversification at the entire village level. So if it is a bad year for tomatoes, the whole village (more or less) suffers, but the buyers can go to other regions where conditions were favorable. An individual farmer cannot easily go against this system by producing something novel, because they cannot produce a large enough quantity to attract buyers. The system is similar in Kenya, although the Chuka County farmers that KALRO is working with are better organized to produce and market together.
From the trainings, farmers are now able to identify pests and diseases such as bacterial wilt, nematodes, black rot, Tuta absoluta, phosphorous deficiency, and pith necrosis in tomato, diamond back moth, aphids and cabbage moth and its natural enemy the hover fly. They now know the importance of scouting prior to taking management steps. To reduce pesticide use, they know the cultural methods to use including pest exclusion, use of traps, and use of healthy seedlings, plant resistance, staking and trellising, hand pulling and spot spraying. When pesticides must be used, the farmers know that they have options to use biopesticides, such as Trichoderma, Nimbecidine, Bacillus thuringiensis, and oil sprays. There were reports by farmers that before the start of the training, one would observe a pest in one crop, such as tomatoes, and spray all the other crops due to the belief that spraying with synthetic pesticides needed to be a routine. Now they know this is not true. They have seen it is possible to raise a vegetable crop and complete a growth cycle without the need to spray any synthetic pesticide.
The situation in Ethiopia is different from other East African countries, due to cultural and historical and language factors as well as resource availability. Growers are not organized and resist organization. Group marketing for vegetables has been tried but failed, so the approach that works in Kenya will not work here. Often, those who farm the land do not own the land. They talked of ‘telephone farmers’ referring to the remote connection between landowner and those who actually grow the crop.
The fall armyworm crisis had a big impact on this project, drawing Ferdu and others away from vegetable IPM work to attend numerous meetings to address this issue. The infrastructure problems in Ethiopia cause periods without internet access, making communication difficult or slow and inhibiting interactions with students. Poor connectivity results in a different sort of cell phone culture here than elsewhere, with less dependence on this technology and less urgency for frequent connection. Also, Whatsapp is less widely used here, and Viber is preferred; we need to determine if connections can be merged.