Growing Maize without fertilizer

19 th March 20so:

With a potential famine looming in our area of Malawi, we decided to grow maize in every space we have.
This is grown between some young citrus trees and intercropped with an amazing plant called tephrosia, which is nitrogen fixing and  has great irrigation type roots to hold the rainwater. We crush its leaves in water and spray for an insect they call a stalk-borer and finally when  the maize is harvested we grind it's dried leaves to kill off weevils who could eat 25% of the stored maize.

This maize is now flowering a time when farmers add Ures a high nitrogen content expensive fertilizer but we just place leafy branches of tephrosia on the ground between the maize plants.

We only grow local maize with a history of coping with the climate and the yield here will equal the best anywhere

No GM Monsanto or noxious chemicals so no expense

Finally when the crop is harvested we place the stalks on the soil where it becomes integrated to improve the soil and the cycle begins again

Oh finally we dont turn over the soin, preferring to dig little holes for seeds.

Climate Smart Agriculture we might call it