Heavy Rains at the Alyssa Farm

Filling Silo Bags

The weekend of July 24th brought heavy rains to the Alyssa Farm.  Four days later, workers were still trying to dry out from the heavy rain received Saturday night.  Due to no functioning rain gauge, Alan Baum, Project Director/Farm Operations, can only estimate it was about an inch or more of rain.  The combines sat mostly idle for a week and a half and not likely to resume harvest until more drying time.  Meanwhile they assembled the Silo bag machine and have transferred all the grain from what was harvested so far into two Silo Bags.  They did incur some spoilage from the rains despite their best efforts to cover the pile.  An estimated amount is thought to be about 100 quintals.  Most damage was caused by water running under the pile with the grain sitting on plastic and nowhere for the water to go.  Plans for high-ground storage will prevent this from happening again.

Estimation of yield so far: The Silo Bags have an approximate capacity of 2,200 quintals each. They are at our midpoint of hectares to harvest at 550 ha.  This puts yields at approximately eight quintals per hectare.  The stand looks adequate for about a 20-30 quintal yield but the heads did not fill well.  The bottom third of the heads filled somewhat
adequately but the top 2/3 is very sparse for kernels. Black spots on the flag leaves produces evidence of prevalent rust.  Haile, a farm manager who has 10 hectares of ground that his family farms in Ginir, claims that farmers in that area were hit hard with rust as well.  Their last crop before this yielded about 40 quintals/ha whereas his most recent yielded only 8 qu.  He claims to have sprayed for rust too, but felt like both he and MIA sprayed too late to do much good. Spraying for the next crop will occur at the flag leaf stage of growth.

Clair and his crew have assembled the first piece of equipment to arrive from North America, the 28′ Kello-Bilt disk.  A tractor to pull it will arrive soon from Addis.  Six John Deere mechanics and technicians from the US, S. Africa, and Ethiopia arrived July 30 to help assemble the soon-to-arrive air drills and help with training.

July 27th was a day of unrest between the local village and MAI workers.  They were literally chased out of the camp and herded into a large group to be lectured by village Elders. Meetings with the Elders are being held to resolve issues, but only time will tell.

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