Getting regular foods
Getting regular foods Cue: For any farmer, the quantity of what they produce and how well it?s stored will determine their food ? and income ? for the year. Production and storage is even more critical for farmers with HIV/AIDS. Weakened by illness, they need crops and farming methods that don?t require a lot of effort as well as effective storage to make sure they have good food all year round. Dodou Jallow ? who works for the Gambian Network of AIDS Support Societies ? is well aware of these challenges and talked with Ismaila Senghore about what farmers can do. IN: ?As most of the support? OUT: ?our forefathers were doing.? DUR?N: 3?28? BACK ANNOUNCEMENT: From Gambia that was Dodou Jallow. What traditional methods of storage can you tell us about? The interview comes from a resource pack produced by CTA. Transcript Jallow As most of the support group members are rural farmers. That means we have to create income-generating activities from farming for them to be self sufficient. Ismaila What kind of crops do you think people with HIV/AIDS can farm because they are usually people that lack energy, so maybe they would need to be advised on crops that are easy to grow and that are of course of high nutritive value. Jallow We are very weak, so what type of farming we recommend to them is fruit tree farming, whereby you have a garden, after fencing the garden you have some fruit trees which if you plant them you don?t need to water them. Some drought tolerant trees like cashews, like mangoes, and so on, just have a fence, at the beginning of the rainy season you plant them and then just taking care you don?t need to water them. Ismaila There are many ways of ensuring that food supplies are constant and regular throughout the year, that is by processing, preservation and storage of some of the perishable foods that maybe out of season. Do you think there is the possibility for your people to learn the skills that will help them ensure that later there will be a constant supply? Jallow That is a very good question. I know that most of our yields became low due to poor storage facilities. So by processing, drying of these fruits like mangoes, you can process it and dry it so that it can stay for a long time. Ismaila We know there are also some grains and other kinds of vegetables that may be easier to store than others. Do you have any choice about what kind of fruits and grains that you may envisage to store? Jallow When you say grains really you have grains which are highly nutritious like maize, they are fast growing, high yielding and with proper care, with proper drying, they can store for a longer time. With just drying them at adequate moisture temperature you can store them. Ismaila Now talking about storage, what kind of storage facilities would you recommend - the design? Jallow Normally when the seed storage there is for the whole entire village, and we see what belongs to all belongs to nobody. So the type of storage facilities we would like to build is a sensible store that will be able to take care of our goods, and then we know that the store is for us and we will take care of it. Ismaila Now how would a store be managed because you know there are possibilities of pest infestation. What kind of preservatives would you recommend for them to use? Jallow With the local system that we were doing, our farmers have been preserving by using wood ash, even these neem trees and so on. We can do it and we will be able to preserve our commodities as long as we wish. Things that you know that they will be having so much pungent smell to drive insects out. You clean the store very well, and then let the commodity be dried well before you store it, let it have adequate temperature immediately before you store it and then you can use these local preservation methods that our forefathers were doing. End of track.
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| Format: | Audio biblioteca |
| Language: | English |
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Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation
2007
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/10568/57176 |
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