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A farm attendant doing mulching at a cabbage farm in Kisumu county. [Denish Ochieng, Standard]
Want to improve your soil? Plant cover crops. A cover crop is grown primarily for the benefit of the soil rather than the crop yield. Cover crops are an important part of sustainable agriculture. They add fertility to the soil without chemical fertilisers via biological nitrogen fixation.
Once a cover crop is fully grown, or the farmer wants to plant in an area that has a cover crop, the conventional technique is to mow it down and allow it to dry. After it is dry, the remaining organic matter is tilled into the soil. Alternatively, some progressive farmers in drought-prone areas favour a no-till method, in which the residue from the cover crop is left on the soil as a mulch layer.
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