Photo – myAgro staff re-package vegetable seeds before distributing to farmers.
One of the main contributions of the myAgro program is that it facilitates access to high quality agricultural inputs to small-scale farmers. In Senegal we have been busy preparing seed and fertilizer for our vegetable input delivery coming up on February 13th and 15th. Preparing for input delivery involves transporting inputs from the capital of Dakar out to our myAgro Senegal program headquarters in Tambacounda. Logisitics is all the more challenging in Tambacounda given its remote location it is one of the hardest-to-access regions of Senegal.
Vegetable seed and fertilizer are available directly in Tamba, but the quality isn’t guaranteed. Local vendors often store seed and fertilizer in stock rooms left with little protection from insects, mice, or other pests. They may keep inputs in these storage units for months or longer before sale with no quality checks. Dakar on the other hand has a few bigger seed companies with lower prices and more stringent storage methods. We ordered our seed in bulk from a seed company in Dakar that keeps its seed safely in refrigerated storage facilities and our fertilizer from another large-scale vendor in Dakar. The challenge was then getting the inputs to Tambacounda and dividing the bulk purchases up for our vegetable packets.
Each of our farmers will receive one gram each of cabbage, African eggplant, tomato, and hot pepper, 12 grams of okra, and 3 one-gram bags of fertilizer. That meant over 800 tiny bags of seed and fertilizer to prepare! Nevertheless, with a few dedicated workers, all the bags were prepared and labeled within 3 days. While a busy time for us, it’s well worth it to give our farmers access to quality inputs with little hassle
