The Young Farmers Club of Majoreni Secondary School in The Southeast Coastal Region of Kenya

● This is club was started in 2019 January. The club started with a total of 8 members but has grown to 30 members currently with I, Alex Polycap being the patron.

● The mission of the club is farming for self-reliance and the vision is to reduce dependability and improving food supply using good and sustainable farming methods.

● The club runs its affairs with the support from the school administration.

● The first inputs were acquired from the registration fee of members who was Ksh. 50 per student and Ksh 200 for the teacher.

● From there most of the inputs have been acquired from the sales of farm produce.

● Some funds from the sales have also been used to support the under privileged students to acquire some basic requirements in school such as pens and uniform.

● Despite the prolonged drought especially in the coastal part of Kenya, currently the group is working on raising tree seedlings to be planted during long rains, kales and egg plant production.

● Due to drought we did conservation farming is minimum tillage, where we only made planting holes during transplanting and the rest of the spaces were mulched using dry grass.

● The production is small scale due to water challenge. The nearest water is 1KM from the school. This is as a result of breakdown of the Primary School water pump that use to pump water directly into our school tank and the nearest borehole 300 meters from the school has less water due to the prolonged drought and is thus used only for domestic purpose by the owner.

● The kale is now being harvested mostly once per week, the eggplant are at the flowering stage and were sprayed with, pesticide, fungicide and flower booster on 15/11/2021. This was the second spray after one was done on 13/10/2021 against pests and fungi.

● The kale was sprayed against pests on 13/11/2021.

The Students in the pictures are;

Research question.

How can the school soil be modified to produce crops?

The school soil having a very high saline content has not been able to produce good crops. The students were therefore to modify the soil to see it produce the kales that they planted.

The students used farmyard manure, which they thoroughly mixed with the topsoil in each planting hole.

The kale crop is doing better, a sign that the farmyard manure is able to buffer the soil for better production.

In two planting holes that were left without manure, the kales dried up. These were used as control for the research.

However, a long-term effect could also include use of agricultural lime, which goes along way in improving the soil.