By Agnes Aineah
Charles Oino, a resident of Rumuruti in Laikipia County watched helplessly as swarms of locusts landed on trees in his compound some time last year. There had been news allover of the destructive insects that had invaded farms in various parts of the country, leaving farmers with massive losses.
Mr. Oino knew that it was only a matter of time before the insects cleared everything on his one-acre piece of land where a variety of vegetables, tomatoes and maize were thriving.
In the days that followed, Mr. Oino and other farmers in the village were up and about, chasing the insects which, to the amazement of the villagers, preferred to stay in trees.
“We realized that the insects were not as destructive as we had imagined. For some reason, they preferred to stay on trees and didn’t eat a lot of from our farms. But there were farmers who registered significant losses,” Mr. Oino said.
Laikipia is one of the 15 counties that have witnessed the invasion of the desert locusts that swarmed into Kenya from Somalia and Ethiopia February last year, in what has been described as the worst infestation in 70 years.
It took Mr. Oino and other farmers in Rumuruti a year of fighting the insects before they realized that it was wealth they were chasing away.
In February this year, Oino met officers from the Bug Picture, an organization that had launched a project to turn locusts into a resource for farmers. Among those that the Laikipia farmer met was Scilla Allen who was managing the Bug Picture’s value addition project on locusts.
“I was in the company of other farmers when I met Scilla and she told us that from the locusts, we could make some money. We thought that it was a terrible joke because all we wanted was to see the insects gone. We didn’t want anything to do with them,” says Oino.
With some convincing, and the lessons that the team from the Bug Picture readily offered on collecting the insects, Oino and dozens of other farmers in his village embarked on collecting the desert locusts which they took in bags to the Bug Picture team in exchange for cash.
“They taught us the best methods/techniques to use in order to capture the insects. We did it at night and we brought out our family members to capture more kilograms of insects. In just a few days, the insects had become very valuable to us,” Oino says, adding that for every kilogram of locusts that was collected, they received Ksh50.
The farmers were taught that the best way to capture the locusts was at night as the insects rested in trees.
At around 8.00 pm or early in the morning around 6.00 am, the farmers would place plastic sheets beneath trees and shake the trees, allowing the insects to fall on the sheets.
“It was easy money,” Oino says, and adds, “There are times I could collect 10 kilos in just a few hours. This was very helpful given that we had missed rains for a long time and we didn’t have food. We used the money from the locusts to buy food for our families.”
Scilla says that the locust project is supposed to be the silver lining to the locust infestation.
“Something good has to come out of this situation. Our aim is to empower smallholder farmers with money-making projects from the locusts instead of allowing them to lose everything,” she said.
Scilla is the project manager of the Bug Picture’s locust colonies in various regions experiencing the plague. She says that the purpose of the project is to monitor the colonies of locusts and to follow them wherever they swarm to with the aim of mobilizing local communities to benefit from the insects rather than to sit and brood over their losses.
The commercial organization purchases the locusts from households and uses them to make organic feeds for poultry and livestock as well as organic fertilizers.
The Bug Picture Organisation which is also working with small-holder farmers in Rwanda has also been raising black soldier flies as animal feed to bridge the high costs incurred by farmers.
The organization, Scilla says, exists to upscale small-holder farming ventures and to reduce the negative impact of organic waste.
“Our aim is to get smallholder farmers to think about the benefits of insects especially in supplementing the costly plant protein in feeds,” says Scilla.
She explains, “At the moment, kitchen waste is not being efficiently used by households. Instead of being thrown away in ways that degrade the environment, the waste can be fed to black soldier flies. When the insect larvae mature, they are dried and milled or fed fresh to chicken.”
Desert locusts, on the other hand are crushed, dried and ground. Milled locusts are then used for various purposes, including the making of organic fertilizers and feeds.
“The other day, a farmer came to us all the way from Nairobi to buy the milled locusts. He said he was going to make feeds for his birds. We gave him a recipe for the feeds and trained him on how to mix the various ingredients,” the official of the Bug Picture says.
She adds since insects are high in protein, the milled locusts make only 8 percent of the total feed. This means that in every 100 grams of feeds, there is only 8 grams of milled locusts.
The organization has developed an open-sources manual with which it trains groups of farmers to make feeds for their livestock. Oino and a group of other famers are some of the beneficiaries of the training.
At the moment, the group is only using crushed locusts to make compost fertilizers which they are using on their organic vegetables and tomatoes, Oino says.
So far, the group has made 100 kilograms of compost manure from the ground locusts that are mixed with grass and maize stalks.
“These are trials and we hope that in a short time, we’ll go full scale and even start making feeds for sale,” Oino says, and adds, “We can’t make feeds this time because the government sprayed the locusts with chemicals. We don’t think they are safe to be used in feeds. But they are good for compost manure.”
When he spoke to us, Oino had noticed a decrease in the locusts in his village. Strangely, but for obvious reasons, he feels sad.
“I am sad because the locusts have flown away and what is remaining is very little. It took us long to realize that they were a blessing in disguise,” he says, adding that he plans to start farming the black soldier fly in order to get the rich animal protein for the feeds project he envisions.
Scilla says that the disappearance of the locusts is a blow to the Bug project as well. The team, she says, has made attempts to follow the insects to areas around Lake Turkana but was obstructed by security officials in the area. Back in Rumuruti, the team is keeping an eye on the eggs that the insects lay before they started vacating the region. These eggs will make the next cycle of locust colonies that Scilla says pose a continued risk till August.
The fact that locusts can only be harvested at night and in the wee hours of the morning also makes the project less appealing and difficult to manage for the organization.
The Bug Picture also struggles with the rough terrain including steep valleys and hills, depending on where the locusts land, making the whole activity of chasing the insects an arduous task. And when they are roosting high up in thick trees, it becomes difficult to shake them down.
“We had instances where the locusts roosted on private land and the owners didn’t want us going there to collect the insects,” the project manager says, adding that the organization didn’t have enough time to explain the nature of their work to the communities in order to get approval to harvest locusts on their land.
Despite the challenges, the smile on farmers faces on getting to benefit from the insects keeps Scilla and her team going.
“There is a family that made Sh10, 000 in just one night after collecting the insects. The whole family came out to work that night. I can’t forget how happy they were because that is an amount casual workers make in a month,” she says.