Irish company to bring new agricultural technologies to Ethiopia

Auranta MagGrow is an Irish company currently establishing the process to manufacture and distribute its MagGrow spraying equipment (knapsacks, tractor booms and greenhouse booms) to smallholder and commercial farms in both Ethiopia and Kenya through the creation of Auranta MagGrow Limited subsidiaries in the two countries.

The company has developed an ingenious method of spraying using magnets to drastically reduce the volume of water required to spray crops. At present East African smallholder farmers are using low cost 20lt backpacks in order to spray their crops with pesticide treatments. To avoid spray drift, these backpacks typically spray coarse droplets of 250-350μm in diameter, with pesticide treatments currently applied using application rates of 300- 500 litres/hectare. The use of the MagGrow backpack will allow significant improvements in chemical utilisation by reducing the application rate to 60-75 litres/hectare. This in turn is expected to have a positive effect on agricultural productivity.

Staff from the Irish Embassy attended the final trails of the use of this spraying technology at the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR) and the results are very promising. All the stakeholders are extremely excited about the future roll out of this technology and are currently working on potential ways to adapt this method to suit the particular needs of small scale farmers.

Read more on this new initiative at http://www.ethiopiainvestor.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4803&Itemid=88