The reality of climate change was yet again foremost in my mind. Normally its effects are relatively hidden away from the average American, but when traveling in a tropical region, you occasionally are hit in the face with some insidious reminder. This time I, along with thousands of Ugandan farmers, was desperately waiting for the rain to start. I was told that the rainy season began promptly at the start of March, but here we were, creeping into June and the dry season bore on. I had come to Uganda to begin my dissertation research for my Horticulture and Agronomy degree. Because of my work as a Graduate Student researcher on a HortCRSP-funded project in Uganda focusing on indigenous leafy greens (link here: http://hortcrsp.ucdavis.edu/main/12Nutrition.html), my dissertation research would also be centered on this little-studied dynamic of African cropping systems.
The questions were infinite: How often are these vegetables eaten? Do women mostly grow them or do men? How are they perceived alongside more recently introduced exotic vegetables such as tomatoes and white cabbage? Can they be grown in large-scale production systems or should they remain “kitchen crops” limited to individual household’s gardens? Could indigenous vegetables contribute to the sustainability of African cropping systems? These questions—and more—could take a lifetime of research. I had three months. Which brings me back to the rain.
I had decided my approach on this trip would be a broad-scale diagnostic survey of one particular indigenous vegetable, nakati. Nakati is one of the more commonly produced indigenous vegetables in central Uganda. You can find it in urban markets within and around Kampala, the capital city, and may even get served a small portion of it along with your matooke, posho, potatoes, and cassava.
Nakati is a dark green leafy vegetable. The leaves and stems are served finely chopped and steamed or sautéed in oil, much like we would cook kale or spinach. It is one of the healthiest foods to grace a Ugandan plate, yet try to find a single journal article mentioning nakati as a potential ally in the fight for food security. ...Let me spare you the trouble – it doesn’t exist. It baffles me how we promote fruits and vegetables like crazy in our own country to promote healthy eating, yet USAID’s Feed the Future Initiative in Uganda—which “seeks to eliminate the disconnect between improved agriculture and improved nutrition”—focuses on maize, beans, and coffee. Including an export crop like coffee will increase the income of some farmers, which then may also lead to better nutrition, but this indirect link seems to be adding more "disconnect" between agriculture and nutrition, not eliminating it. I'm not a nutrition policy expert, but I wonder if we find this kind of reasoning in our domestic nutrition policy.
Part of the reason indigenous vegetables are NOT on USAID’s priority list however relates to that lack of journal articles on nakati. Without the research to persuade policy makers, indigenous vegetables will never be viewed as a food security crop.
Since so little research on indigenous vegetables exists, I decided to begin my exploration with a field diagnostic survey. This would give me the opportunity to simultaneously answer a few basic questions, such as the extent to which farmers are growing nakati, which management practices they are using, and what kinds of yields they are achieving as well as the more specific agronomic question: which agroecological variables contribute the most to yield losses? Which brings me back to the rain. In order to do a survey on farmers’ nakati production, I would need them to actually be growing nakati.
The overwhelming majority of farmers in Uganda practice rainfed agriculture and the farmers I was talking to were not planning on sowing their nakati seeds until they were sure the rains were consistent. Some farmers had planted seeds already since there had been a smattering of rain in the past couple weeks, but there was a high likelihood that those seeds had germinated and died in the subsequent dry spell. Everyone, including me, could do nothing but wait.
by Lauren Pincus, UC Davis graduate student
The questions were infinite: How often are these vegetables eaten? Do women mostly grow them or do men? How are they perceived alongside more recently introduced exotic vegetables such as tomatoes and white cabbage? Can they be grown in large-scale production systems or should they remain “kitchen crops” limited to individual household’s gardens? Could indigenous vegetables contribute to the sustainability of African cropping systems? These questions—and more—could take a lifetime of research. I had three months. Which brings me back to the rain.
I had decided my approach on this trip would be a broad-scale diagnostic survey of one particular indigenous vegetable, nakati. Nakati is one of the more commonly produced indigenous vegetables in central Uganda. You can find it in urban markets within and around Kampala, the capital city, and may even get served a small portion of it along with your matooke, posho, potatoes, and cassava.
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Photo courtesy Lauren Pincus
A typical dish from a restaurant in Kampala. Features rice, posho (milled corn meal), matooke (steamed banana, sweet potato, irish potato, groundnuts (peanuts), and a side of meat sauce. See that dark green spot? That’s the vegetables. Also features a sliver of steamed pumpkin. A plate from a rural restaurant would look just like this, only minus the vegetables and perhaps with beans instead of meat.
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Photo courtesy Lauren Pincus
When nakati is ready to harvest, farmers will go through their fields and pull out the largest plants by their roots and bundle them together to take to market, leaving the smaller ones to grow further. While this method does allow the farmer to earn more money, it makes a researcher trying to take yield measurements want to pull her own hair out by the roots.
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Photo courtesy Lauren Pincus
Nakati in bunches, as it is sold in the marketplace.
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The overwhelming majority of farmers in Uganda practice rainfed agriculture and the farmers I was talking to were not planning on sowing their nakati seeds until they were sure the rains were consistent. Some farmers had planted seeds already since there had been a smattering of rain in the past couple weeks, but there was a high likelihood that those seeds had germinated and died in the subsequent dry spell. Everyone, including me, could do nothing but wait.
by Lauren Pincus, UC Davis graduate student
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