Field Visit # 2 – Paprika Farmers, Chisamba District 06/08/06

The purpose of this visit was to meet with paprika farmers to see how their paprika harvest was progressing, as well as deliver some woven polyethylene sacks in which the graded paprika is to be packaged for transport to the processing facility.

In this area, the paprika harvest is in full swing. They suspect the crop to be completely harvested and ready to ship within a few weeks. There were no complaints here about the weather etc. Here the crop yield is high.

This area is home to the Chipembi Farm College. This is an agricultural college run by the Anglican Church to teach farmers proper farming techniques. Here students, who have just gradated high school, undergo classroom instruction as well as practical field work, with a large field area, complete with irrigation, for students to plant and maintain their own crops. The crops the students grow are sold to help with costs. The paprika seedling nursery for the local community was established at the college because of the excellent irrigation facilities present. Once the seedlings were ready they were transplanted to individual farmers fields. At the college we met with Mr. Namasumo, who is the head of production and a lecturer. He showed us the current paprika crop, the drying stands used to dry the paprika, as well as the graded bales they have already produced.

Paprika starts life off as a seed in a highly controlled nursery, where it is allowed to germinate and grow into a seedling. In the nursery, the seedlings are taken through a hardening process to ensure their survival upon transplanting. When the seedlings have reached a specified size, they are transplanted to the growing fields. In this case the nursery was established by a farmers co-operative, who then shared in the seedlings, and will then sell all their harvested paprika through ASNAPP to the processor.

Once the seedling is transplanted, it will take about 8-9 weeks before the first flowers appear. From the time the first flowers appear, it will take about 3-4 months before each flower becomes a pod, and the pod is ready to be picked. Picked pods are then dried before baling. The preferred method of drying is on elevated drying stands which allow for the paprika to evenly dry, and remain relatively free of contamination from animals. Most farmers in this area, since it is their first time growing Paprika, have yet to invest in the drying stands, and thus have opted to dry their Paprika on the ground.

The paprika plant will continue flowering at 2-4 week intervals depending on the sunlight, moisture available and disease rate (disease may cause the plant to become dormant). The variety being grown here is Papri-King, which is an open pollinated variety and tends to be quite disease resistant, although not immune, it responds very well and quickly to chemicals to treat any disease.

The Paprika grown by this co-op is bound for a processing plant, here, in Zambia (which hopefully I’ll be visiting in the near future), which will process the paprika and extract the oil, rather than into a dry spice.

This was a very fast visit, but it showed me how things are generally supposed to work. Although not 100%, The farmers here are doing a really good job with their paprika. The bulk of the crop is of Grade A or B. The only real criticisms was the techniques they were using to dry the paprika and the fact that some of the farmers had tended to neglect their fields once the harvest began, allowing an overgrowth of weeds. But overall, the results shown in this area are very encouraging, which means farmers will be willing to grow paprika again next season.