Merry Christmas John

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Poping into head

This is me (Stuart) in need of a haircut in our latest sorghum crop, this is about 55 days since emergence, looks good to me. I planted the latest 600ha on a "solid" configuration as I thought we would get some in crop rain. Its a bit variable across the field although most of the crop would have had around 100mm since it was dry planted in late Oct.(it had a full moisture profile under the top 100mm of dry soil) 

First Kenyan Christmas

Boys and Bikes at Christmas

Christmas morning and the boys scored a push bike each, James our big boy is here helping Wisdom just before John came to grief.

Crop Progress

The Weighbridge is alive

Duncan our principle building contractor and his offsider read the first weight (my Prado) on the weighbridge.
Having a big concrete pour this week, we have 25t of cement powder to kick off the foundations to the grain shed, much much more needed. We are mixing it ourselves rather than getting ready mix. We have a 400lt mixer and it is earning its keep at present.
Harvest of the first sorghum has been a very frustrating story although some parts coming from Australia on Saturday morning should get us going.

Pa and Wizdom

Annie's Mum and dad are over staying with us at present, this photo is of Derik (Pa lamont) having a look over the newest sorghum planting with Wisdom his newest grandson. The crop is around 40 days from emergence and is just popping a head out here and there. 

Sorghum is growing well

The Previous photo of the Sorghum just emerging was taken on around the 10th of November so this is about 24days later than that photo, I am happy with the growth. We have had around 80mm since it was dry planting into a dryish topsoil in late October, the profile was full under that so the 80mm has consolidated the profile from top to bottom. Nov is on average the wettest month with an average of 90mm of rain. We actually had more like 60mm in November as the other 20mm fell last night (Dec)
December average is around 50mm and if we get another 30mm that would be heaps until hopefully a bit in Jan.With the cooler temps the plants in this environment seem to be very efficient on the water use. Time will tell though. Also the most recent 600 hectares was all planted on a solid configuration of 30 inch or 75cm rows,this was due to my view that we would recieve adequate in crop rain, wait and see.

Boys and Sorghum

The little boys came out to the farm with me this afternoon, both did some driving, only time on the road was went they crossed it.
I could'nt work out why wisdom (in the blue shirt) went very quite (top photo) I had said we were going to go "home" after checking the Sorghum, after asking him what was wrong he ask me if I was taking them back to the Childrens Home, the bottom photo is a couple of minutes after I reasured him he would always be our boy and that his home is with us.

James,John and Wisdom,three brothers

This Photo is of the three happy boys when John and Wisdom just arrived to start their new life with us, the darling boys had little backpacks on and all they had in the world was in them.
Annie had organized their room to be so welcoming with some special things like Teddy's to give them extra comfort.
Annie was at work teaching today and so I had the little boys, the Cummins mechanic comes first thing in the morning and so I hope we can have a win on the harvester engine issue.
 

Annie, John and Wisdom

These are our beautiful new sons, Wisdom and John, we have been working very hard to get the mountain of paperwork done to get approval for a temporary placement leading to full adoption.We hope to have them living with us within days.
Wisdom is 5 and John is 6 although John is tiny. We will do our best to grow him out.
I had a crazy week with a very quick trip back to Australia to sort out some business.
I have returned on Thursday night and Friday our new second hand Combine/harvester decided not to want to start, something wrong with the CAP's fuel system (bad idea Cummins). I hope to have someone who can help me here on Monday.

Flying Field Day

We ran a field day and we ended up with five plane loads and two car loads of commercial farmers from different grain growing areas around Kenya and one (who drove funnily enough) from Tanzania.
Had a good day, it was a real encouragement to not feel like the only commercial farmer around which is how it feels sometimes.
We have been waiting on parts for our new secondhand harvester and although they are in Kenya it is a long process to get them through customs.
I gave up today and will just do what I can with what I have and hope it holds together, 600 acres of Sorghum is ready and I am very keen to get it off. No grain storage built yet and so all sold off the harvester to an end user.

Next 1500 acres of Sorghum just up

Taste testing Sorghum

This is Ava she is the daughter of some wonderful Canadian friends who came and stayed with us. They are a credit to Canada.

Sunrise at the farm

Those Birds

We have currently got about 2 to 3 million birds eating our sorghum, our 41 bird scaring people are helping although the damage is real. The above photo is of a small group.
I am starting to get creative and so lets wait and see whether we can sort these freeloaders out.

 

Planting Sorghum Again

We have just finished planting about 600 ha (1500 acres) of sorghum on our second field. This is our son James on the tractor. We have Sorghum only 2km away that is about two weeks off harvest and here we are planting.Full profile of moisture in this country, we dry planted into the top dry 100mm of soil and only days ago received about 30mm which should join up the moisture and germinate the seed. Wait and see. We also flew a pre emergent on after planting and so the rain was excellent to incorporate this and activate it.

Harvester Arrives from Germany

Our new second hand harvester arrived a week or so ago, very happy with it, we have currently got it pulled apart to repair some damaged sieves although everything else looks very good.

Field Day

We had a good field day about 10 days ago at our farm, we dug a soil pit to show the root exploration, explained a bit about the different properties of the different soil types plus lots of other things relating to our sorghum crop. We are gaining some good traction with much interest in what we are trying to show. i.e that cropping can be successful on these heavy soils in the lower rainfall areas.
 

800,000 Flying Rats

We have had some serious bird numbers on the sorghum over the past two weeks, on Friday I had the Government bird man come and visit our farm to access them.
He made an estimate of 800,000 which believe it or not is not as many as there could be.
We tracked the birds (red billed Qualia) to their roost about 10km from the crop and are "Exploring" our options.
We have added some more bird scarers, we have 41 people now who start at daylight work until about 10/11am when the birds stop feeding and then start again mid afternoon.
The birds can eat 10 grams per bird so they could be eating 8t per day, I don't think they would be because of the bird scarers, as they don't get much undisturbed eating time.Still they could be getting 4t which is still bad.
One good thing is that they only will eat the sorghum while the grain is at the milky dough stage, this reduces the risk time which is good.

Looking North at the Trials

This photo is looking north, if you click on the photo and expand it you will see in the back ground the trials.
From Left there are Desi Chickpeas,Kabuli chickpeas, the big bare area is where the mung beans should be (if powdery mildew had not wiped it out) then a different white sorghum variety (Sila) then two Corn/Maize varieties on the far right. All the trials are 4 hectares although the mung beans are 8 hectares.
The foreground is the later planter white Sorghum.

Another Birthday at the Orphanage

I went over to one of the girls 9th birthday this evening, Annie and Grace would have come although Grace fell off a motorbike about 30minutes after arriving home from School, no serious damage, although it really scared her.
Every time we visit the children at the Orphanage there is a revolving door of boys in particular who just want to be hugged.
It shouldn't be that amazing I guess as they really crave a fathers (and Mothers although there are many more women on staff) love, with 23 kids it is difficult for the staff to spread themselves around. In saying that they do a wonderful job at caring for all.
It's a very challenging thing to drive away and not feel very torn.

Birds,those coots (a coot is a undesirable thing)

We have had 25 ladies chassing birds off about 600 acres of the most advanced crop. More later on this.

Crop Progress

The crop is moving alone, the bottom photo is of one of the good size heads that are mostly on the secondary tillers. They are better heads in general to the first ones.Hmmm

Moisture Profile is full

As can be seen the  soil profile is full of moisture, We recieved about 30 to 40mm over the week in two falls and even though there is a dry band I expect the moisture to join up.
We hope to plant on this field in about 10 to 14 days. The moisture probe is 1.1m long, the probe is just to the right of my boot in the bottom of the photo.Click to enlarge.

Another 20mm of Rain Yesterday

We had a very much appreciated 20mm of rain on all the crop yesterday, as I write this there is another storm making a racket, maybe some more today. 40mm of rain in crop in 120 days,not much but enough.
A new Kenyan friend, Peter, asked on email how many days the sorghum had been planted for about 120 days for the first planted to today, probably about 10% of heads are full grain, 80% filling and 10% just flowering. So quite a spread.
The Birds have started giving us curry, we have a plan though, more on that later.

Weigh Bridge Foundations Fiinished

Lucky and John's Birthday Bash (click on photo to expand)

Looking from East to West across the trials

The last planted white Sorghum in the for ground, red Sorghum behind with the Maize at the back, the Mung Beans and Chickpeas are behind the Maize, these are obviously the commercial scale trials.
In the Commercial trials there is White Sorghum, Red Sorghum, Two Varieties of Maize, Mung Beans, Kabuli Chickpeas and Desi Chickpeas.

Maize Could just make it ???

The Maize is hanging in there, this is directly beside the Mung beans in the previous photo. The ground is cracking open as the crop dries the soil moisture profile out, its a race to the Finnish now.

Mung Beans living down to their name

These Mung beans or Green Gram as they are known here, have been smashed by Powdery Mildew, the trial area has received less than 5mm of rain and still the PM has destroyed the crop, I am taking the approach that if a crop requires fungicide then it is not considered as the small holders don't have the capacity to be spraying multiple times. Lucky its a trial.

Day at the Dr with John

Annie and I have had a busy three weeks visiting doctors with various children from the Orphanage, Wednesday we took John and Christine (one of the house mums) into town. John had had some appointments with specialists. Great news all is well with him. We all enjoyed a very nice lunch, John liked having his pirate sitting on the rim of his glass.

We also picked up Luckys new glasses,the photos is when we arrived back at the home and lucky tried them on. We will take Lucky back in 8 weeks to see if the glasses are helping to correct an allignment problem he has. (thats what I call it).
It is both John and Luckys birthday party on Saturday night, they both are six, should be fun.

Chickpeas Looking OK,Good For 5mm Total Rain In Crop

 

 

 

My best yield guess is 1t per ha on the chickpeas,we will harvest them and then plant that seed straight away in the next trials. We only have 4 ha of both Desi and Kabuli so we will only be able to sample the market with what we have over and above seed. Wait and see.

Leveling New Land

We have had the tractor working for around 40 days preparing the second area of about 1500 acres (600hecatres)
We are on the last week I think, it will be as flat as a tack (That means level, smooth)
Although I am a no tiller (i.e not into cultivation) with new land it is unavoidable.
The moisture profile in this 600ha is absolutely full and we are waiting on either some rain or the end of October to plant this area to Sorghum.We will plant it dry starting in the twenties of Oct if we have had no rain up until then, the reason is that November is just about a sure thing and as we have a full profile of moisture it would become to wet very quickly. We will also have more commercial scale trials, not sure what, I am still thinking on this. 

Max enjoying the Ride

James Trip

Hi, this is James, last week I went on a trip with my school to Tsavo West which is a huge national park in south eastern kenya. The park is mostly dense shrub and also has mountains which is what we aimed to climb. We were about two hours drive inside the park and camped at the base of Ngulia mountain right next to a crocodile and hippo infested river. Where we were camping was in amongst the palm trees that are home to tonnes of elephant, hyena, leopard and lion as well as buffalo and hippo. During the night as we were sleeping in our tents, we heard lion, hyena and the guards told us the next morning that there had been hippos and elephants wandering around our tent during the night. Amazingly, elephants are so delicate that they can step over tent cords and dodge us sleeping which I'm glad to hear.
Returning from climbing we were all exhausted and us boys decided we would have a brief dip in the river. We were a little nervous at first but we had people looking out for hippos and crocodile and it was very refreshing.
 While climbing the mountain , although we didn't reach the summit, I was amazed to see elephant tracks and poo all the way up in incredibly precarious spots. On our way out of the park on the last day, we were very lucky to see twenty or so elephant on the side of the track, we saw hyena and we were incredibly lucky to see a male leopard resting under a tree. This is not very common at all especially in that game park as the cover is so thick.

The Butchery

Our Kitchen floor was a make do butchery last evening, the conservancy have some sheep and they kindly dropped one to us (wool off)
I don't have a cleaver so out to the wood hot water heater and washed the little Axe up. The chops were a bit rugged,I am a bit like lightning ( never hitting the same place twice)
It was very hygienic, I put down a old sheet.

Sorghum Doing Well

I took these photos today, I have had a couple of difficult days and so this is therapy to me to walk the crop. Annie and the kids are well, Annie had a busy but good day yesterday at the children's home, she goes on Wednesday's and helps with their little school.James has been at an adventure camp over the past few days,Graces year went last week, great team building stuff, it really enthused her. Farmers, you can click on the photos to enlarge, the top photo shows the wildlife conservancy in the background, the crop is an oasis of green in a brown landscape.

First Cobs

The Maize has its first cobs, not sure how it will end up,wait and see

Chickpeas podding up

We had to spray the chickpeas this week, the grubs were eating well. The trials area which is where the chickpeas are has had around 5mm of rain since planting in three falls. About 75/80% of the other crop has had about 20mm.

You think you have staff issues

This morning I had to have a little chat to a couple of the team, we have some foondees (stonemasons) working at the moment and one threatened another with a panga (machete) yesterday.
I have separated them today (by 8km) to calm things down.
Don't think it was all that serious although best to let them calm down.
The panga fellow is very sorry this morning and so hopefully all is OK.
In Australia you would just get out on the flat and have a fist fight and sort it out, just happens these fellows have pangas. (they don't carry them always, just at work)

Sunday afternoon with the Kids

From the top, Grace and two of the children having a laugh,next John tries my hat on, I think he likes it, and at the bottom, Annie chats to a little darling. (click to enlarge)