Growing Sunn Hemp

Fields of Sunn Hemp line our farm road

The blog posts which I write about the crops which we grow on our farm are quite popular, and as I haven’t written one in a while now, I thought that it was about time to write another – this time about a new crop we’re trying for the first time called Sunn Hemp.

As you know, our farm is 3500 acres in size and the main crops which we grow are beans (seed beans – for export), safflower (for cooking oil) and wheat (for the local flour market) – you can click on any of the crop names mentioned here, which will take you to a previous blog post written about each specific crop.

The Sunn Hemp adds a lovely splash of colour to the surrounding green farm lands

We practice dry land farming – relying solely on rainfall as nothing is irrigated. We are also one of the first farms in Tanzania to practice Zero Till farming (click here to read more about that), a method which is fast catching on here in Tanzania and is being used by more and more of the smaller farmers as well as the bigger commercial farming concerns.

I'm lucky enough to have fields of brilliant yellow flowering Sunn Hemp growing in front of our house at the moment - it's certainly adds to the view !

In addition to all the crops mentioned above, this season we have also planted 160 acres of Sunn Hemp as a soil conditioner. (The seed we have originates from Mexico). Sunn Hemp has a long tap root which means that it aerates the soil nicely and also allows moisture to penetrate it. The roots also help to naturally loosen the soil – so the Sunn Hemp provides a natural way for us to prepare the soil for it’s next crop.

More Sunn Hemp fields in front of our house

The Sunn Hemp we grow will be harvested for it’s seed, which we will then replant as a soil conditioner for future crops. I believe that the crop can also be used to produce fibre and is also sometimes used as a green manure – as it is also a very good nitrogen source. I really like the little yellow flowers which it produces, they add a splash of brilliant yellow against the green backdrop of the farm and the fields are especially pretty when viewed en masse from a distance.

Spraying Our Crops By Air

Staff on standby at our airstrip with the water bowser and aircraft fuel

Due to the large size of our farm (3500 acres) our crops are often sprayed by air. There've also been times when we've suddenly had a crop disease (or insect infestation) and have had to quickly call in the air sprayers in order to get the situation under control quickly - as spraying by air is much quicker than doing it on the ground.

Our farm has it's own 'bush' airstrip for light aircraft and is well maintained (eg. if we needed to use it in a hurry for a medical emergency / Flying Doctors). Our air sprayers (a father & son team from Kenya) are well known to us and have sprayed for us for years now - both here and on our old farm.

Intense spraying programmes where you are meeting tight deadlines (due to disease or changing weather conditions) mean that sometimes the spraying lasts for several days - so our air sprayers have become regular guests in our home, staying over with us and entertaining us with incredible stories of crop spraying all over remote parts of the African continent - and have become good friends over the years ! (I've also served many a 'picnic' breakfast or lunch at the airstrip as they've had no time to stop - grabbing what they can on landing, to eat in the cockpit as they continue spraying, before swooping down for the next course as they re fuel the 'plane !)

The modified Cessna single engine spray 'plane on our farm airstrip

I always know when the crop sprayers are due in, and without fail they announce their arrival by swooping LOW over the house - so low that they can see right in the windows as they approach ! (They joke that this is to see what I am up to & keep me on my toes !) They do the same thing when they leave - we are usually all out on the front lawn (including the house staff and dogs - who bark madly at the 'plane and try to chase it !) In fact, this is pretty much the 'tradition' here in Tanzania with light aircraft. Whenever we have people flying in/out of the farm they always swoop low over the house (as you would toot the horn on your car) when arriving and leaving .... but none as low as the crop sprayers dare !

Our crop sprayers are two of the hardest working people I've come across & work from sunrise to sunset if weather conditions are good

The spray 'plane is a modified single engine Cessna and lands frequently during a day of spraying in order to refuel (we keep AvGas or Aviation Fuel for this purpose) and fill it's spray tanks up with insecticide. This is mixed on the ground and we have a crew of farm staff standing by to help mix and put it into the aircraft's tanks. We also have a mobile water bowser on the airstrip as the insecticide usually has to be mixed/diluted with water.

The spray 'plane is just visible on the horizon as it sprays a field of our wheat

If you click the photo above to enlarge it, you can just see the 'plane spraying on the horizon. These photo's were taken a few days before Christmas last year, when we had to spray 800 acres of wheat with a weed (grass) killer.

The drone of the engine becomes a familiar sound as the 'plane flys over the house many times during the spraying process - sometimes for several days at a time, until the job is done

We have to be extremely careful that the 'plane does not spray anywhere it is not supposed to. Extra caution is also called for during strong winds, as these can carry the e.g. weed killer on to nearby neighbouring subsistence crops which are grown by local people along the borders of the farm to feed their families and wipe their entire maize or bean crops out - a real disaster.

You can read a blog post I wrote some time ago about our farm airstrip and company 'plane over here. I have never taken the offer up of going up for a quick spin to see an aerial view of the farm and surrounding areas, though. After spending the first 5 years of my life in Tanzania regularly flying around remote locations on light aircraft when I was working in the safari industry here, I swore upon leaving the industry that I would never do so again and so far, so good. Many years ago, I 'missed' a lift on a 'plane flying out of the Serengeti National Park and on arrival at my destination (I flew in on another 'plane) there was a huge 'buzz' at the airport as the 'plane had not yet landed .... I found out later that it had crashed, killing all on board instantly. Sometimes death taps you on the shoulder .... breathes a warning in your ear .... and the 'what if's ?' freeze on your lips ... you realise then that yes, sometimes it's best not to tempt fate. And to grab any second chances you have in life, with both hands.

Sorting Beans ......

Our farm is historically a bean growing farm, with all the beans we grow being exported to Holland. We only grow beans for seed, and it is this bean seed which is exported. (I wrote about our bean crop in more detail last year, you can read that post over here.)

As I've already covered aspects of our bean crop as it is planted/growing/harvested on our farm in the post mentioned above, today I wanted to show you what happens to the beans once they leave our farm and are transported to our head office/factory in the city.

Can you see all the ladies sitting above in their traditional brightly coloured Kitenge cloths ? Well, they are sorting (grading) the beans by hand. They are employed as casual labour each season - the women are known to pay great attention to detail and this job provides income for many families - for some families, this is their only source of income.

The railway line runs through our head office/factory yard. You can see the rail carriages in the photo above, waiting to be loaded with the bean seed. You can also see some ladies sitting to the right of the rail carriages - they are also sorting and grading the beans (it was a very busy day when I took this photograph, and they'd run out of space inside !) The rail carriages run to the coastal port of Tanga, where the beans are then put on a ship and sent to Holland. Sometimes they are transported to Tanga by road, too.

Once the beans have been graded/sorted, they are packaged into large (100-115 kg) hessian bags and labelled and then stored in the warehouse in tall stacks, ready to be loaded onto the rail carriages that you see in the middle photograph.

Our farm had 700 acres of beans planted this season, and we grew a total of 8 different bean varieties. Our yield this season was around 400 kg's of beans per acre and our biggest crop threat was - I kid you not ! - elephants .... you can read about those naughty crop chomping ellie's over here.

Our Safflower Crop

I can't believe that I've been blogging about farm life for 1 1/2 years and have not done a post on our Safflower crop yet ! It is one of the crops which we grow every year, and the main crop which we grew when we lived on our old farm (where we were surrounded by 14 000 acres of the stuff - and no, that is not a typing error !) In fact, the company which my husband works for is the biggest Safflower grower in Tanzania (with 8000 acres planted in Tanzania this season alone) ... so you see, it's about time I blogged about it - don't you think ?!

Anyway - the photo above shows a field of safflower here on our farm. The photo below shows a close up of the safflower plant - these plants pictured are drying out and almost ready to harvest. As you can see, they are very spiky (almost thistle-like) in appearance. For this reason, safflower is resistant to cattle (no wandering herds ever feast on these fields !) and also quite drought resistant - well, to a degree. The plant survives quite well in dry conditions.

The seeds of the safflower plant are similar to sunflower seeds and ours are used for manufacturing cooking oil for export. Safflower oil is quite sought after as it is low in saturated fatty acids and high in Vitamin E, and although we used to mainly supply the American market, we now supply the European market (as the prices are higher).

We harvest the seeds by machine and they are then bagged and sent by truck to our factory in the city. (The 2 photo's below show our warehouse - known here as a 'go down' - where the bagged seeds are stored)

During the harvesting season on our farm, we have trucks delivering to the factory pretty much on a daily basis. We have 400 acres under safflower on our farm this season, with around 3000 acres in total under safflower in our entire area (West Kilimanjaro) - mainly being grown by small contract growers.

Some of these contract growers plant as little as 2 acres and we provide them with full support - seed, chemicals, advice and equipment to harvest the crop as even 2 acres cannot be harvested by hand, due to the prickly nature of the plant. (Harvesting 2 acres by machine is pretty rare in a country where the majority of small scale farmers still do everything by hand). Each year more and more small scale farmers are growing this crop as an additional source of income for their families, and it has been exciting to see over the years, the impact that this crop has had on small rural communities as a result of this.


The photo below shows our safflower oil press at the factory (sorry - not very clear as it was a dull, rainy morning when I took this photo). It is here that the seeds are pressed to extract the oil. (I love the smell of this part of the factory, as it always smells like freshly popped popcorn !) The oil is then pumped straight into huge black 'bladders' inside rail containers (there is a railway which runs through the factory area so the oil is put straight into the containers) - much like the silver bag you find inside a box of wine.

The rail carriages then run to the Tanzanian coastal port of Tanga, where they are then put onto a ship and sent across the ocean to Europe. The leftover seeds/shells which have had the oil extracted from them are gathered and packaged and sold as animal feed - our current market for this is the neighbouring country of Kenya. So you see, not a bit is wasted !

We usually have as much safflower oil as we need for use in our own home if we like, but to be honest I do not cook with it much - firstly because I prefer to stick with what I know and have always used (sunflower or olive oil) and secondly because to me, safflower oil has a 'different' sort of smell to it (which I think flavours the food in a different way, too). I suppose as the wife of one of the largest growers of safflower in Tanzania, I should not tell you that - but I am always honest with my readers ! (I'm not saying that it has a bad smell/taste - just an unusal one, and I suppose it's a case of what you're used to).

So, the next time you're shopping and you see a bottle of safflower oil on your local supermarket shelf - who knows ? It may very well have come from our farm, right here in Kilimanjaro's foothills !

Our Coriander Crop ....

This year we’ve planted a tiny crop (3/4 acre) of Coriander plants in an empty field just near our house (pictured above & below). We had a small batch of good quality, disease free seeds which we used for the planting. These seeds had actually been given to me as a thank you gift by some people last year – which might seem an odd gift to give, but then this is remote Africa – where shops are few & far between !
Anyway, the fact that the seed is of such good quality, the idea is that we grow the plants for their seeds, which will be harvested and in turn used to plant a bigger crop, who’s seed will be harvested to plant an even bigger crop and so on until we have a big enough crop to harvest the seed and sell it for export (keeping some back so that we can keep re planting). This is just one of the small “hobby” type projects which my husband has going on the farm, and it is actually more like a trial seeing as we have never grown it before. (You can just make out the tiny white flowers of the plant above - sometimes they can also be a pale pink colour).

Coriander is also known as Cilantro or Chinese Parsley. It also goes by the name Dhania here in Tanzania, and I believe is native to various parts of both Africa and Asia. All parts of the plant are edible – the leaves, the seeds (fruit) and the roots.

If you’ve ever eaten Coriander before (especially the leaves) you will recognize the taste as it is quite distinctive. The leaves are commonly used as a garnish for curries and hot dishes – heat destroys their flavour quite quickly which is why they are used mainly as a garnish. I sometimes add torn Coriander leaves to salads or dips (you can see my Yogurt Sauce For Curry recipe over here and my Mango Salsa recipe over here, both of which contain Coriander leaves.) They are also great when added to salsas and chutneys.

The hard round fruits (which grow to a maximum diameter of 5 mm - photo above) are also known as coriander seeds and can be eaten when they are still green. The best way to use these though (in my opinion !) is once they are dried and then they are great lightly toasted in a pan and ground before being added to curries and other dishes. I always keep a stock of the seeds on hand, as toasting and grinding them & adding the fresh powder to a dish (as pictured below) gives much more flavour than using already ground seeds which you can buy in a bottle as Coriander powder.



The whole seeds (fruits) can also used as part of a pickling spice (for example pickled onions or gherkins), in sausage fillings and even as part of a spice mix/cure for dried meat (known as Biltong here in Africa).

The roots of the Coriander plant have quite an intense flavour and are often used in Thai dishes and curry pastes. (I have never used the roots for cooking before, but perhaps that's something I'll try soon !)

I’ll keep you posted on how the first crop goes, and no doubt you’ll see a few recipes cropping up on the blog which contain coriander as an ingredient in the near future !

Threshing Beans

Threshing & cleaning the beans by hand. Some 120 people from surrounding villages have been employed to do this on our farm this season.

We’re busy with our harvesting season on the farm at the moment. I recently posted about our wheat harvest and today I thought that I’d tell you some more about our bean harvesting, and exactly what that entails.

Firstly, all our beans are harvested by hand. This is known as ‘pulling the beans’. The beans are pulled and left to dry out in the fields for about 10 days. Then they are all loaded on to a large trailer (pulled by a tractor) and dumped on to Hessian sacks which are laid out on the edge of the farm fields.

The tractor then drives over them to crush the pods and begin the release of the beans inside them (amazingly, the beans aren’t damaged or crushed during this process !) From here the beans are completely removed from the pods by hand, cleaned and placed into bags.

The bags are then taken by road (large trucks) to our factory / head office in the big city where they are graded by hand before being transported by road once again, to the coastal town (and port) of Tanga, where they are shipped to Holland.

These beans are all used for / sold as “seed beans” and are not for consumption in this form.

We employ a large number of people from the surrounding villages to help us with the bean harvest each year. This season we have employed 120 people (mostly women but some men aswell) who otherwise have no income as the majority of them are subsistence farmers. Apart from their daily wage, they also get to take as much of the empty bean pods home as they like, for feeding their livestock.

Sometimes at night, we get a few sly people coming and putting a herd of 100 or more cattle through the ready harvested bean fields and they eat all the pulled beans (lying in the fields to dry) or beans that have not yet been removed/packed and leave before sunrise so we can’t catch them. Aside from being costly, this is heartbreaking after all the work, time and care gone in to a field of beans like this. No one has fences around their farms here as they are just too vast. Our farm alone is 3500 acres and part of that runs along and across a public access dirt road, so fencing it is almost impossible !

Harvesting The Wheat Fields In Front of Our House ...

A combine (above) harvesting wheat fields in front of our farm house

Local villagers collecting the leftover wheat for their livestock (above). Can you spot the 'hidden' dogs ?!

Here is a photo of the wheat being harvested in front of our house around 2 weeks ago. (You can see photo’s of this same field taken in late June when it was still green over here).

The Combine Harvester which you can see in the photograph is a German one. This wheat is destined for the local market, wheat being one of the crops which we grow on the farm for the local Tanzanian market. (It mostly ends up being milled into different kinds of flour, and is used by one of the large bakeries in the city for making bread, too.)

As with our bean hay, we allow the local villagers to come in after we have harvested and collect whatever they need for feeding their livestock (a lot of wheat is sometimes left behind that the Combine’s “miss” or are unable to harvest). This is a service we offer to the community and we do not charge them for it - it can very often make a huge difference to a herd of livestock and the family it provides food to, especially when grazing is scarce. Some people who do not own livestock also come to collect the leftover wheat, which they then bundle and sell to livestock owners for hard cash.

In the second photograph you can see this same field (and beyond) about a week after it had been harvested, with a few people on it collecting the leftover wheat for their animals. They were actually all children (who shouted constantly at me as I was taking the photo “Mzungu ! Mzungu !” … “White Man ! White Man !”) as many children here are given the responsibility to look after livestock and it is shockingly common to see kids even as young as 4 or 5 herding small groups of goats and cows in very remote areas and even more common to see older kids doing the same.

(Can you spot the ‘hidden’ dogs in the 2nd photograph ? If you click on it to enlarge it, you’ll see Josie and Mbwenya, who came all the way across these fields after a day of exploring in the local village, to get their supper. They were eagerly awaiting it in this photo, as the sun was just about to go down for the night …………………….)

Our Wheat Harvest Has Begun ...

The wheat field at the bottom of our garden is coming along nicely

Bags of wheat drying & airing in our farm "go down" (store/barn) before being transported to the city

In April I did a post on our current wheat crop (which you can read here) and also included a photograph of the wheat field at the bottom of our garden. This is the exact same field of wheat pictured above, taken from the bottom of the garden (only from a slightly different angle) a couple of weeks ago.

We are slowly starting to harvest the first lot of wheat now. Not all of it is ready for harvest yet (as you can see the field in front of our house is still quite green) … but it won’t be long now.

Some of the wheat which we harvested last week was a little wet – so I posted a picture of it in the open bags, stored in our “go down” (a term used here for a store or barn) where it is being left to dry and air a little, before being sealed (the bags are sewn by hand with sisal twine) and transported by road to the city.

A couple of weeks ago, Justin suddenly came in to the house “Mama, Mama - there is a small problem !” He was ironing out on the veranda and had suddenly seen a little blonde head and a reddish coloured tail bobbing along the top of this very same field of wheat in front of the house. It was my daughter and one of our dogs, Dibble … they had squeezed through a gap in the wooden fence where one of the wooden slats was a bit loose. Of course I ran straight down there and hauled her out – she had been having a whale of a time … and without any shoes on, either – kids, hey ?!

So, needless to say the fence has since been fixed and thankfully, neither my daughter nor the dog have been on any adventures since !

Our Bean Crop

A close up of some of our bean plants

A field of beans just ending at the edge of the African bush (where you see the trees in the background)

Our farm has been a bean growing/producing farm for over 35 years now. We practice dry land bean farming, which means that nothing is irrigated. (In fact none of the crops which we grow on the farm are irrigated, we rely solely on rainfall, all year round).

The beans which we grow are seed beans (i.e. not for direct eating). We grow 6 different varieties on the farm, and all originate from Holland and are grown for export back to Holland each year.

This season we have planted 600 acres of beans. They were planted at the beginning of March, and will be harvested from mid July onwards. A good yield for us is around 500 kg’s per acre.

All the beans are harvested by hand. For this, we employ 250 casual “pickers” who come from the surrounding villages – men and women of all ages, both young and old. As a result, and as a result of other casual labour which we employ during the year (we only have a small handful of permanent staff) we help to provide a source of income for 100’s of families which would otherwise have little else than their own subsistence crops to rely on. In addition to their daily wage, once we have finished harvesting, they are allowed to take as much of the remaining bean hay as they like home with them, which they use to feed their livestock and sell / trade with other subsistence farmers.

The beans have to be harvested by hand because if we did it by machine, it could cause too much damage to the seeds. They are then transported by road from the farm to our head office / factory in the big city where they are graded by hand and then bagged and packed into containers. The containers are transported by truck to the Tanzanian coastal port town of Tanga, where they are loaded onto huge ships and taken across the ocean straight to Holland.

Once we start harvesting the beans next month, I’ll take some photo’s to put on the blog so that you can get a ‘feel’ for what the harvesting season is like here. It’s a very busy time for us, and of course each year we wait in anticipation to see what our yields are like compared to the previous season, and which bean varieties are performing better than others. (My husband gets terribly excited by this, but I have to admit that I do not – a bean is, after all, just a bean, isn’t it ?! Ha ha !)

Fields Of Wheat

Wheat field as viewed from the bottom of our garden

This is a photograph which I took today, of the wheat fields in front of our house. They were planted about a month ago, and should be ready for harvesting in June. If I walk down to the edge of our garden (the garden boundary is the wooden fence that is just visible in the photo) and I look out over the fence, this is what I see.

We practice crop rotation on our farm, and in previous years have grown both bean and safflower crops on this same area of land.

This season we have planted 1000 acres of wheat in total. We have planted 6 different (local) varieties of wheat and if the crop is good, the yield will be around 2 ½ tons per acre. This is one of our crops which is grown for the local Tanzanian market (the others are exported). We supply one of the largest millers/bakeries in the country, who mill the wheat in to flour and they also make bread from it. Once we have harvested it, they send their trucks in to collect the crop directly from the farm (which can be fun and games during the rainy weather - but that’s another story !)

All this wheat has been planted using the Zero Till method which I talked about the other day. Spraying is done by tractor but if we have a sudden emergency (disease or insects) then we spray by air. We have our own bush airstrip on the farm and we have a crop spraying company which comes in from Kenya to spray for us.

The lines of trees which are visible in the photograph act as wind breaks.

I’ll post some more photo’s as the wheat nears harvesting stage … it is a “pretty” crop once fully grown - especially when the wind ripples through the lush, green fields and creates a wave like effect.

Zero Tillage Farming Methods

A Zero Tillage Planter in action on the farm


A field of wheat just planted using the Zero Tillage method

I’m proud of the fact that my husband was amongst the first farmer’s in Tanzania, and the very first farmer in the West Kilimanjaro area, to practice Zero Till or Zero Tillage farming which is a form of Conservation Farming.

We are busy with our planting season at the moment, and are using Zero Tillage planting methods for our current crops of wheat, beans and safflower. It is a ground breaking farming method here in Tanzania, so I thought it would be interesting to write a little about it.

My husband first tried Minimum Tillage farming in 2006 and quickly switched over to Zero Tillage farming as he found it to be the most effective of the two methods for him personally. He has found it to increase his yields and decrease his operating costs, when compared to “conventional” planting which involves cultivation of the soil beforehand.

Zero Tillage basically means planting your crop without any form of cultivation whatsoever –you plant directly in to the earth / untouched residue plant matter (organic matter) left over from the previous season. This in turn conserves soil moisture and also allows the natural organisms in the soil to function and the soil eventually returns to a more “natural” state, which also sees a reduction in things like soil compaction.

It can be likened – in it’s simplest form - to mulching your garden flowerbeds, but only on a much bigger scale !

The planter frames are built in Tanzania, and the planter tines are imported from Australia. They come across by ship to Mombasa, Kenya and are then transported by road to Arusha, Tanzania where the Zero Till Planters are assembled, and then brought out to our farm in the foothills of Kilimanjaro.