Organic farming: the future hope to ensure sustainable agriculture

These farmers used compost to fertilize their wheat farm

Chemical fertilizers, Urea and DAP, were introduced to Ethiopia in 1974. However, it failed to bring about a sustaining solution to the recurrent food shortage of the rural community. None of the factors that drove the country’s food crisis in the past four decades have gone away.
On the other hand, the price of chemical fertilizers on global market is increasing at an alarming rate.  The Ethiopian government has also stopped its financial backing of the farmers with this regard. These have made things much more difficult for Ethiopian farmers to afford these fertilizers.
A few weeks back the Newsweek magazine reported that there is an increasing worry over the availability of chemical fertilizer as the world is running out of phosphates—the key ingredient in the industrial fertilizers. Much concerned about this threat, the UN Secretary- General called on rich nations to up R&D spending in agriculture to encourage the development of new kinds of high-yield crops, artificial phosphates and other farm innovations.
Among the farm innovations that help to ensure sustainable agriculture is promoting the use of organic agriculture and transfer of improved technology. Sunarma’s projects have already taken up organic agriculture as one of its development components. It trains the farmers how to prepare their own organic fertilizers (compost, liquid manure and plant tea) from cheap, environment-friendly and locally available materials (cow dung and straw) that contain the necessary ingredients to fertilize the soil.
In 2009 close to 450 farmers were trained on compost preparation in both Wof Washa and Wuchale Jida Projects. The farmers prepared about 2,283 cubic metes of compost and applied on their farmland and vegetable plots.