Natural-Farmed Maize Out-Yielded Chemical, 4.8 vs 4.1 t/ha

0:00 Aloha! Thank you. Okay, loud? So, my name is Richard. Kwame Denteh. I come from Ghana. And my supervisor... I am a student of Konkuk University, and my supervisor is Professor Doo Hwan Kim, and I'm presenting on the topic maize production under natural science, organic and conventional farming systems. I want to just give a brief introduction of Ghana

0:51 and the decision why I wanted to know about corn in natural farming. Now, so Ghana is about 24 million people and agriculture employs about 55% of our population. And so you can see maize production is covering about more than a million hectares of land in Ghana, and you can imagine it's a very big deal when it comes to cereal production in Ghana. Actually this research was carried out at Paju, here in Korea, but we tried to do that and then replicate in

1:46 Ghana based on the climatic conditions there in Ghana. So these are the main crops you can find in Ghana. Look at it, you see that maize is occurring as the second crop after cocoa. Ghana is popular for this cocoa, followed by maize. Now rice has come up these days. Rice is becoming the third after maize. So this gives you a clear understanding why I have decided to research so much into corn and the natural farming, for the purpose of our symposium today, natural farming.

2:43 So yesterday I presented on this topic, so in order not to bore the majority who were here yesterday, I would like to skip some of these, you know, points. But basically, looking around us and everything that you know is coming up it is clear that um conventional farming is a threat to our environment today. When we talk about food safety, we talk about environment, we talk about health, all you will see that conventional farming is having a factor to contribute. This is calling for a serious research to establish

3:30 natural farming that must mature. It started here in Korea. The people of Hawaii are also doing very well. They are all over on YouTube and we are taking a lot of information from them. Mr. Eric, Mr. Trump and so many others, we thank you for the good work you are doing. We are learning a lot from you Hawaii people, and Philippines also. Thank you. So I started my research in May and then in August. Maize, as I have said, the variety I used is chal-ogsusu, Ivory II.

4:19 That is a Korean-developed, you know, variety. So we look at corn and the three farming systems: organic, natural, conventional. Let's see, the natural, we use just natural, you know... let me do this. Okay. We use just natural, you know, resource materials, inputs, no chemical. And the conventional, fertilizer and the pesticides, which are now becoming the problem of the

5:04 day. Well, you know, today you can say we are making a paradigm shift from Millennium Development Goals to Sustainable Development Goals. What it means is that we must look for better ways of agriculture. So natural farming is all about you know maintaining a very good you know regime of nutrient cycle nutrition cycle. So from seed, we did treatment to the seeds for natural farming, and then standards also were maintained for conventional and then organic, you know, likewise. Now after our soil

5:54 treatment, we came in with Type 2. Most of us here are, you know, natural farming enthusiasts, so some of these things we don't have to be explaining them anymore. Now the Type 2 is what you come, you know, or the first input you make after, you know, your soil treatment, which is IMO or mineral, and then your mulch and other things. Now this is foliar application. This one here, that too, foliar application to the crops, and this is supposed to give the whole crops a very good start in growth. Now, so transition here, also these

6:45 are all natural, so, you know, very cheap to make, very cheap, very easy to apply, you know, resources. And this is supposed to help the crop to transform itself from you know that vegetative productive stage to the reproductive you know stage where it starts to, you know, bear fruits and flowers. Now just after germination, not long after germination, there was some drought, and this is what happened to, you know, the crops. Look at this conventional, it's dying. We don't see so much, but look at organic, look at conventional, almost

7:34 everything is established. Now you can see a little bit of information we picked, counting by counting, and see: natural 4, organic 3, you know, see conventional 20 plants dying just because of short one-week period of drought. Okay, so in the course of the growth, we also recorded this. A lot of tillers. In the organic, there were a lot of tillers. Corn, naturally, is not supposed to tiller. It's supposed to be a single stem crop. But see, you have so many plants coming as suckers. See, conventional. It's even more serious with conventional.

8:20 But see the natural. You can see it's without, you know, tillers. And this tells you that we allowed the crop to perform as it stands, as the law of natural farming. Now there was insect occurrence, and look at it from here, see, you see the leaves are all, you know, having those. It's also the same here. I know from there you cannot see very well, but it's not a very serious issue here, but see that natural remains very clean, very clean, and that tells you this. I want to say

9:06 natural was able to stand because of the natural, you know, protective that was given to the crop, you know, from the inputs. They were all grown at the same place. How come insects came and they invaded other crops, and then natural was left untouched? Now let's look at root development. See. So see, natural. Look at the... look at the root size very big and well developed with a lot of root hairs telling you

9:57 that it's going to make a very good uptake from the soil. Now look at, you know, that of organic and conventional. This tells you how, you know, the outcome of growth is going to be. So let's now begin to look at the farmer's main, you know, goal in production, which is yield. So look at it: ear length, ear weight, with, you know, grains per plant. This is for the farmers. And look at the figures. See, conventional, see natural; conventional, natural; conventional, natural. And let's look at number of seeds, number of seeds per plant. See, this is conventional, and look at

10:50 natural; conventional, natural; conventional, natural. You know, this is grain weight at harvesting. You know, corn, when it dries on the farm, it still has some kind of moisture, so you take that weight, and then we took this weight after drying, and still natural is still better than conventional. So this is the, you know, total outcome. Let's see, this is yield, tons per hectare. Okay. As you can see the differences between conventional and natural, organic and natural. This tells you that natural farming is not only solving the

11:37 problem of, you know, environmental health and food safety issues, but also can contribute or can replace you know other systems especially conventional that is giving us all these problems in terms of food production. May I? Thank you.