After the launch of the Madagascar Lima Beans Farming project in December 2023—how has been progress to date? The first phase was building up seed banks through urban areas backyard farming and we have done extremely well. With hundreds of participants from the forum—the good news is that we now have thousands of beans which have been harvested.
However only a few have managed to graduate to farm on bigger spaces of land but we remain hopeful that throughout the year there will be more serious farming with more transferring to bigger plots of land.
The author is one of the few to transfer to rural areas starting with close to an acre of planted seeds. So how has been progress? Mixed results registered as plants were affected by poor soils and a dry spell that came in early January 2025. The good news though is that at least 60% of the plants are doing well after a prolonged period of rains during the later period of January.
It is still a long road with a lot of learning to be experienced—but so far so good.
