Cape Talk, Thursday night

This method is now being promoted by the government across the country, and many more farmers are being trained on how to do it. The big size is quite big. By the time it was growing, it was already making decisions to say, hey, I need a co-Isaac Chavula is a country director of TNE, the NGO behind Deep Bed Farming. It is so special because it makes the farmer become resilient to climate change and become food secure and income secure.

With environmental friendliness in mind, because this technology doesn't allow water to escape from the field and cause erosion. So, you can imagine if we control erosion, it means that we'll have sustainable production in our fields because the soils will remain rich and increase yields. And then the environment will also be safe because we will not be subjected to degradation due to erosion. And how important is this for feeding the nation here in Malawi?

In Malawi, we believe that our wealth is in the soils. So good soils make us rich. And we have food, we have income from that, we produce enough for sales, and then we can even export. After all, Malawi used to export a lot of crops. We used to export ground nuts, we used to export maize, we used to export all these beans and grass. You know, we were rich then, but then we allowed our soils to get lost. But eventually, the produce that is realized from the deep bed farming promotes itself.

Yields more than double and they become food and income secure within a year. Up to 40,000 farmers across Malawi have been trained to use deep bed farming. People in Kenya and the Gambia are also taking it up. TNE admits that it takes time to convince farmers to change their old practices, but for people like Elizabeth, we are not going to stop. We will continue until I die.

Deep bed farming. Yes. You're listening to People Fixing the World from the BBC World Service with me, Myra Anubi, out here on a farm in Malawi. And it's glorious, the sun is out, and you might just hear some chicken and goats in the background. But specifically, I'm here to see how farmers' yields have increased by the technique called deep bed farming. But there's a problem.