Volume 9, Number 1

One hundred and six farmers in two provinces were interviewed about their strategies of storing grains for survival on their farms. The main findings were: (1) Farmers find it difficult to use the chemicals suggested by the extension service for post-harvest pest control.(2) Instead, farmers use more local plants as traditional pesticides, although their actual effect is not proven. (3) Farmers observed that certain varieties seem to be more resistant than others to major pests. Formal research stations did not study this issue. (4) Farmers use indigenous knowledge to keep the costs of inputs down and find compromise solutions when they are confronted with a clash of factors influencing the situation of the crop (e.g. when fixing the optimal harvest time). Introduction In Africa, the bulk of grain is produced by small scale farmers (Poswal and Akpa, 1991). Food security of these farmers, and especially in famine prone countries, depends on their success to grow and store their staple food that they need for their families, with a minimum loss of quantity and quality, using an effective method that they can afford. They must be able to keep the stored produce until the next successful harvest, and this might be more than a year, in the case of a crop failure. Even in developing countries, which have central storage facilities, farmers in peripheral regions find it difficult to procure the needed grains in times of famine, unless they can rely on their own food stores. Besides obvious economic considerations, African farmers are strongly influenced by socio-cultural factors like the norms of their ethnic group (Horton, 1993, Elwell and Maas, 1995). So far, nearly all research on grain storage in Ethiopia focused on what happens to the stored grain without asking what farmers think about storage problems, e.g. Berga Lemaga et al. (1990), Dawit Abate (1982), Franzel et al. (1989), Kasho (1985), Lynch et al. (1986), Solomon Birhane (1983), Yemane Kidane & Yilma Habteyes (1989). Only Itana Ayana (1985) analyzed factors influencing the adoption of packages of agricultural technology. He found that extension agents were tied up with the distribution of inputs and other administrative tasks. During the Mengistu regime, extension agents were also team leaders for recruiting militia and in “agitational committees for tax collection” certainly not the best preconditions to gain farmers’ trust! The researcher also found that farmers had limited access to inputs. He did not investigate farmers’ grain storage behavior. The high costs and the erratic supply of chemical pesticides in developing countries have stimulated a renewed interest in traditional botanical pest control agents (Bekele et al., 1996). Their potential was largely ignored, in the past. Thus, FAO’s latest summary of grain storage techniques in developing countries (Proctor, 1994) does not even mention these indigenous methods, probably because their efficacy has still to be experimentally demonstrated. In Ethiopia, Lynch et al. (1986) mentioned Datura stramonium, Phytolacca dodecandra, Tagetes minuta and Weinia longiflora as plants with pesticidal effects, which are used by farmers to protect stored grains. Yemane Kidane and Yilma Habteyes (1989) added chilli pepper (Capsicum sp.) and Croton macrostachyus to the list of local plants used to protect grains in on-farm storage. However, our knowledge on farmers attitudes towards these plants are still minimal. As to physical protection measures, polyethylene lining of underground pits was recommended by Boxall (1974), Lynch et al.(1986) and Hassan Shazali et al. (1996). The objectives The objective of the research was to get a better understanding of farmers’ objectives and