Divisi

15/10/2026

Understand EUDR deadlines, evidence requirements and how Divisi helps African exporters and organisations prepare production records for buyer due diligence.

13/10/2026

13/10/2026

Cut your drainage furrow before you do anything else. Work the uphill side of the crop, about 30 cm deep and 30 cm wide, at a gentle grade so the water moves without gouging a gully. Two people can clear a 0.4 hectare (1 acre) plot in under two hours — that's fast enough to matter mid-storm. Send the outflow to a natural watercourse or ground you've already written off, never onto a neighbour's field.

With the furrow running, get to your animals. Untether and unpen before anything else — a tethered goat or penned flock can't reach higher ground on its own, and a flat floodplain can go from ankle-deep to swimming in under an hour.

Your grain store comes third. Raise every sack at least 40-50 cm off the floor and pull it away from the wall. Wet maize starts growing mould within about 48 hours, so a sack that does get wet needs spreading out to dry within hours — never reseal it.

For any seedlings already under water, let time tell you what to do: still green and firm at 24 hours usually recovers once it drains; wilting past 48 hours means real losses are coming; past 72 hours, treat the stand as lost and plan your replant.

Once the water is down, treat anything before you drink it — boil for a minute, or add one teaspoon of household bleach to 20-25 litres and let it stand half an hour.

Save this post. Furrow, then stock, then grain, then the crop — that order holds whether this is your first flood season or your fifth.

12/10/2026

Times have changed - ElNino or not - we don't have to still rely on outdated methods of planting on a guess.

Is your target planting date falling within the optimal planting window for your farm/plot or you're still hoping & guessing last year's dates will be the same this year ?

What grows in Zambia? Explore options including Mango, Sorghum, Soybean, and see when to plant them district by district, using local rainfall, soil and…

02/10/2026

A wet year doesn't just fill your fields, it fills every low spot on your land — and one of those spots, dug out to about 200 m2 (roughly 20 by 10 metres), can be growing table-size tilapia in six months.

Site it on ground that holds water: dig down, wet a handful of soil and roll it into a sausage — if it holds together and looks shiny there's enough clay to hold your pond. Keep the water 1 to 1.5 metres deep, and build the bank at least 0.5 metres above the highest water line so a storm passes through your screened inlet and overflow instead of washing your fish out.

Stock about 2 fingerlings per square metre — roughly 400 fish in a 200 m2 pond. All-male tilapia grow fastest and most evenly, but if you can't get them, add a few African catfish (about 3 tilapia to 1 catfish) — they eat the young fish that would otherwise overcrowd the pond, and in trials this lifted harvest weight from about 140 g to nearly 200 g per tilapia.

Feed cheaply: about a wheelbarrow of manure a week grows the plankton fish eat for free, topped up with rice or maize bran and a little pellet feed. Watch the water like a second crop — it should be the colour of green tea. If fish gasp at the surface at dawn, add fresh water immediately; that's low oxygen and it can wipe out a pond fast.

Aquaculture is the fastest-growing food sector on the continent, up 455% since 2000, and Africa still produces under 2% of the world's farmed fish — the market at your gate is wide open. Harvest at 250-300 g, usually five to six months in, and sell fresh the same day.

Send this to anyone with a wet low spot doing nothing but breeding mosquitoes.

01/10/2026

Build your feed bank while the grass is still green, because once the rains stop everything you didn't cut and store is gone for the season.

Grow a mix while the rain is still doing the work for you: Napier grass for bulk (cut it young — its protein falls from about 21% at 30 days of regrowth to under 4% by 70 days), a legume like lablab for protein (about 18%), and a fodder tree like Gliricidia (about 22% protein in the leaves) to carry you through the driest months.

Once it's cut, lock it away two ways:

Hay — cut at pre-flowering, dry 2-3 days until it's crisp and snaps, and stack it under cover. A box bale runs about 20 kg.

Silage — chop leafy fodder to 1-3 cm, pack it tight into a sealed drum, tube or lined pit, and leave it airtight for at least 3 weeks.

And if you've got maize stover left from last season, urea can turn it from a poor feed into a real one: dissolve 5 kg of urea in about 50 litres of water per 100 kg of chopped dry stover, seal it airtight for 2-3 weeks, then let the ammonia smell air off before you feed it. That roughly doubles the protein. Always dissolve the urea fully first — never feed it dry, and keep it away from very young calves and non-ruminants like pigs and poultry.

For the numbers: a 300 kg cow needs about 7 kg of dry matter a day, which adds up to roughly a tonne — about 50 box bales — over a 150-day dry season if grazing runs out completely. A goat or sheep needs closer to 1 kg a day, about 150 kg over the same stretch.

Walk your plot this week and pick one fodder to plant and one store to start filling. Send this to anyone in your group still planning to graze their way through the dry season.

30/09/2026

More than 90% of the seed planted across sub-Saharan Africa comes from farmers' own fields and neighbours, not agro-dealers - which means how well you choose and store it matters more than most people realise.

Not every crop is worth saving seed from. Open-pollinated maize, beans, cowpea, groundnut, sorghum, millet and rice breed true, so the seed grows into a plant just like the parent. Hybrid (F1) maize does not - in Kenya, recycled hybrid seed lost 16-20% of its yield in the first replant and 32-46% by the third. Keep buying that fresh, or switch to a good open-pollinated variety you can save for free.

Choose your seed before harvest, not from the grain heap at the end. Walk the field and flag 30-50 of your healthiest, best-yielding plants of one variety, harvest them separately, and keep only full, clean grain. Dry it to about 8% moisture - a maize kernel should crack when you bite it, not dent - and store it airtight, cool and dark; seed left in an open tin can lose half its germination within six months.

Before you plant, test it: roll 50 seeds in a damp cloth, count the sprouts after 5-7 days and double the number for your germination percentage. Below about 70%, don't risk it.

Send this to whoever's saving seed off the heap this year.

29/09/2026

A banana mat is a perennial business - one well-managed clump can keep earning for years across the East and Central African banana belt, from Uganda and Kagera to Rwanda, Burundi, eastern DRC and the plantain zones of Cameroon. A stormy El Niño season threatens that in three separate ways, and each one is cheap to head off now.

Wind topples heavy bunches because the roots are shallow under all that weight - improved matooke hybrids can carry bunches up to 51 kg. Prop every bunching plant with a forked pole, and dig a test hole a hand deep after the next downpour; if water is still sitting in it a day later, that plot needs drainage before the next storm, not just more mulch.

Keep only three stems per mat - a fruiting mother, a half-grown daughter, a young follower - and cut everything else at ground level. A crowded mat is a windy, disease-friendly one.

Wilt has no chemical cure, so tool hygiene is the whole defence. Banana Xanthomonas Wilt once infected a third of Uganda's farms and cut yields by up to half, but a simple routine - snapping off the male bud by hand, cutting out only the diseased stem, and flaming your panga for 20-30 seconds between cuts - dropped incidence below 10% within a month in one pilot.

Send this to whoever's mat is carrying a heavy bunch right now.

28/09/2026

Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire grow about 70% of the world's cocoa, and in the last El Niño, global output fell almost 11% while Ghana's crop hit a 14-year low. That swing isn't just weather - it's decided farm by farm, by shade, sanitation and drying.

Cocoa wants 1,500-2,500 mm of rain a year and a dry season under three months. Push past that and disease climbs fast: one Cameroon study found 65-70% of pods hit by rot once rainfall passed 2,200 mm. Keep your shade at 30-40% - roughly 16-18 tall trees per hectare, spaced 24 m apart - and you cool the canopy without keeping it so damp that black pod takes hold.

Black pod itself is beaten at the source, not with a spray. Harvest ripe pods every week and bury every infected one - a Cameroon trial that did this cut the black pod rate by 22-31% in its first season. Add just three well-timed copper sprays instead of the usual six, and yield rose 10.9-51.8% while paying back nearly twice its cost.

None of it matters if the drying goes wrong at the end. Ferment 6-8 days, turning every two days, then dry slowly to 7-8% moisture - a Ghana trial that did this hit 98% bean purity, against 18% mouldy beans from a rushed five-day ferment.

Send this to whoever's canopy has gone too thick this year.

25/09/2026

The cheapest fertiliser on your farm doesn't come in a bag - you grow it between seasons for the price of seed.

A legume cover crop like mucuna, lablab or cowpea pulls nitrogen out of the air and stores it in its leaves and roots - the same nitrogen you'd otherwise buy. A strong stand of mucuna or sunn h**p can hold 190-320 kg of nitrogen per hectare, and a well-run mucuna relay lifted the following maize crop by up to 1.9 tonnes per hectare in East Uganda trials - around 38 extra bags of 50 kg.

Match the legume to your rainfall: lablab, cowpea and pigeonpea for short, uncertain rains; mucuna, jack bean or sunn h**p where the wet season runs long. Sow it into your maize at knee-height, 6-8 weeks after planting, and slash it as it starts to flower - that's when the leaves carry the most nitrogen, no tool needed to tell.

It also does double duty in a heavy-rain year: the living cover breaks the force of the rain and cuts how much topsoil you lose.

Send this to whoever's field sits bare between seasons.