“This year I decided to increase my plot to 1-½ hectares because I was so satisfied by the last harvest.”
Yacouba Doumbia has been farming for a long time. The 73-year-old man from Solo Korein in Mali is the head of a 20-person family. When myAgro came to his village, Yacouba signed up for a dedicated myAgro savings account for agricultural inputs, but did so with an experienced dose of skepticism. “When I enrolled in myAgro, I thought it was just another NGO that gives out fertilizer and seeds, and that’s it. So I took half a hectare,” he said, demonstrating the classic scientific approach of cautious, risk-averse farmers. Yacouba planted part of his field with myAgro’s seeds and methods, growing the rest his usual way. “Gradually,” he said, “I became aware that the old agricultural methods that I practiced were both a waste of time and also a waste of fertilizer and seeds, because like many farmers, I scattered fertilizer over my field.” In contrast, myAgro agents teach the ICRISAT method of “microdosing,” measuring out a tiny amount of fertilizer in the same hole as each carefully spaced seed.
Despite his age and experience, Yacouba was willing to listen, experiment, and learn. “With the arrival of myAgro, they taught us a lot of things. First, how to prepare the field, at what time we should start planting, how to plant both the fertilizer and the seeds together—all the procedures to have a good harvest.” With microdosing, smaller amounts of fertilizer have a bigger impact on crops, because each bottle cap full of fertilizer directly nourishes a farmer’s seed while keeping it away from weeds that will later compete for water and soil nutrients. Microdosing multiplies the effects of myAgro’s savings program, which helps make agricultural inputs like fertilizer and seed more accessible to smallholder farmers. Using seed spacing and microdosing stretches that input package even further, compounding its impact while reducing the amount of inputs farmers must buy for each hectare.
What did Yacouba find after he experimented with microdosing on part of his land? “Certainly it’s a little difficult and tiring, but the advantages are great enough” to make it worthwhile, he said, “especially if the rains fall adequately. The proof is that I harvested 12 100-kg bags of corn on my half hectare, and I never had that much corn on that size plot before. If the rainy season had been good I would have harvested even more! This year I decided to increase my plot to 1-½ hectares because I was so satisfied by the last harvest. I would like to be able to feed the 20 members of my family for the entire year without paying for food like before.”
