Growing Cassava

Cassava post-harvest losses quietly drain farmers’ profits and reduce food supply faster than most realise. In our early days as smallholder cassava farmers, poor storage, delays, and handling mistakes turned valuable harvests into waste. Here’s what’s causing it, and how smarter practices can help you keep more of what you grow.

A weak cassava stem can cost you your whole harvest before you even touch the soil. After thirty years of farming cassava in Nigeria, I have learned that good stems matter more than fertilizer, spacing, or almost anything else.

Two farmers plant the same-sized plot. One harvests twice what the other does, using the same rainfall and the same soil. The difference is usually the variety.

Weeds can silently steal more than half of your cassava harvest before you ever notice the damage. After three decades of farming cassava in Abia State, Nigeria, I have tested hand hoeing, mulching, and herbicides, and timing wins in the end.

Most cassava fertilizer guides treat NPK ratios like a recipe to follow blindly. As a chemical engineer who has farmed cassava for thirty years, I read those ratios like a process spec, and the numbers only make sense once you know what each nutrient does underground.

Most cassava planting guides list five methods and stop there, as if choosing one were the hard part. The harder part is that some of these methods are becoming obsolete while a lab technique most farmers have never heard of quietly reshapes cassava propagation across Africa.

The first rain of the season can be a trap. Many farmers plant the moment early rain falls in April, only to watch the rain disappear for weeks afterward, rotting cuttings that never had a chance to establish roots.

Nigerian cassava farmers’ experience in the cassava industry has been mostly one of doing everything alone, with no electricity and no government support, yet this same crop has built billion-dollar export sectors in other countries entirely.

Preserving cassava stems well between harvest and planting determines how strong your next season starts. I learned that lesson on my mother’s own cassava farm in Ntigha, decades before I understood the actual science behind it.