Meeting with TSBF on 8 November

Meeting with Tropical Soil BiologyFertility Institute on 8 Nov

Persons Involved
Dr Jonas Chianu, 7224755, j.chianu@cgiar.org (TSBF)
Dr Bernard Vanlauwe, 7224755, b.vanlauwe@cgiar.org (TSBF)
Dr Tony Margetts (FO)

They can offer the following
* germ seed of a variety that they would like farmers to use (so called promiscuous variety)
* agronomy, studies of varieties, planting spacing, mixing with other crops and crop rotation
* processing at 3 levels, community level processing leading to local business, includes processing to make milk
* soil science such as particular soils and phosphate studies

We have the following that they need to meet their obligations
* organised farmers groups (FAAs & SHGs)
* ability to provide education and training to these groups
* provision of services to the farmers groups to facilitate setting up local businesses
* trading agreements based on both contracts and trust which have been shown to work
* arrangements to distribute seeds and collect product which have been shown to work
* provision of transport in our areas
* negotiating with the buyers eg BIDCO

Actions for Farmers Own
* Laban to meet Bernard in Western and to arrange to meet the farmers together to help to identify in more detail ways of working together on common soya based projects
* Laban to discuss common agricultural matters with TSBF to identify in more detail ways of working together
* FO to estimate if possible how much soya seed our farmers groups have available for planting next season (TSBF are trying to estimate this for all Kenya as there is a big shortfall in 2006)

Other things to consider
It seems that soya is high on the agenda of the Min of Ag and MOPND just now
Education and training is one of our strengths, maybe we should have this more prominently in our future plans
Soya needs phosphate, how do we do this
We should look at the NGO Malnutrition Matters, they are a partner of TSBF
We need to set up a monitoring programme to monitor benefits at a micro level, eg at the family level
We need a costing for soya production including likely floor price and bonus