Adedokun Waliyu 
May 12 is designated as International Day of Plant Health by the United Nations to raise awareness about how protecting plant health can help end hunger, reduce poverty and boost economic development. A Canadian charity is helping to further those goals by helping small scale farmers in Africa.
Farm Radio International creates as well as fosters the continued development of informative radio programming that provides vital information to rural farmers in the region.
“The men and women in Africa who grow most of the food, certainly for their families, their communities, but even the nation, and have so much potential to produce more, grow more and improve the quality of their lives doing it, but are held back by inadequate, unreliable or irrelevant information about the kind of changes they can make,” explains executive director Kevin Perkins.
He says in places where access to the internet is limited or non-existent, radio is the most accessible and ubiquitous way to reach people. Teaming up with 1,400 radio stations across sub-Saharan Africa, they are able to serve an audience of nearly 25 million.
“The programs that they produce for farmers run the gamut of the kinds of information they need. [Like] weather advisories — with climate change, weather is changing so much and the weather patterns are really out of whack from what they were used to before. So they really need those weather advisory services,” he says.
Among a vast variety of other topics, the programs also provide market information that helps farmers negotiate the best prices for their produce. In addition, they cover best practices for growing various crops with step-by-step instructions and inform them about new varieties of seeds and which crops are more resilient to climate change.
Other programs have helped farmers combat plant diseases that would have otherwise destroyed their crops.
“There’s a fungal disease called aflatoxin that affects some kinds of cereals and it makes it toxic to the people who eat it. So we had a series of programs in Ghana that helped farmers learn how to prevent aflatoxin,” says Perkins.
“We found out through an evaluation that they were about 40 per cent more likely to practice use aflatoxin control measures because of the radio program.”
The initiative also allows for farmers to provide feedback and comments with an aim to reach policy makers.
“They also want to be heard … so that what happens in their country supports them and helps them and radio programs can help them do that by giving them a platform where they can share their own views and experiences,” he says.
To raise awareness about their work while also helping Canadian plant enthusiasts, the charity has created a musical track in collaboration with violinist and composer Andrew Forde, who has famously worked with the likes of Sting, Mary J. Blige and Justin Bieber. It’s designed to help plants thrive based on prior research that suggests certain sounds promote healthier and more fruitful growth.
“It’s not every day that you get an opportunity to combine sort of the world of science with music. Plants can hear and they listen, maybe not in the same ways that we do as humans, but they really respond to different vibrations, different frequencies, different rhythms,” says Forde.
“I did some research to see what those things were, and it really fascinated me. For example if there’s water nearby, the roots of the plants will sort of start leaning and going towards the sound of the water. If there’s bees nearby petals of flowers will actually open and, and be more inviting. So there’s a lot of reactions that plants have with the natural world that I didn’t know beforehand. But in sort of figuring out what those things were, I tried to incorporate a lot of that into the composition.”
He ended up creating a symphony in four parts based on the life cycle of plants, cleverly titled PhotoSymphony, a play on photosynthesis.
“The first movement is called ‘African Soil’, and it’s really about celebrating the spirit of Africa and all the fertility of the soil and all the things that it’s given the world. The second movement is a little more jazzy and it’s more about sort of the seedling phase where the seed starts to germinate,” he explains
“The third movement is actually a metal track — that was a lot of fun to create and it’s really driven rhythmically and that’s supposed to be the celebration of the plant in bloom. And the final is sort of the harvest — it’s a little bit more melancholic, but there’s a lot of rhythms and circulations that feel really good to plants and hopefully to the human ear.”
“The internet and all the knowledge found in the internet is at our fingertips. It’s in our pockets at all times. For a lot of people, that’s not the case, but they still need to learn knowledge that they can apply to better and improve their own lives. So I think the mission of any organization that is focused on some of these populations that don’t have things that we take for granted is fantastic,” he says.
CityLine gardening expert Carson Arthur has been playing the track in his greenhouse for about six weeks.
“Prior to listening to Andrew’s track, we were replaying a lot of ’80s soft rock, which the staff loved and the plants loved too. But we flipped it over to this classical track and all of a sudden what you started to see was healthy new leaves, a lot of new shoots, we’re seeing flower and growth development,” he says.
“I saw within the six-week period a real change in the composition of the plants, the health of the plants, the chlorophyll — the leafy green really started to improve when we started playing the music. Now obviously this is just my perception of the situation, but for me as a plant lover, I can tell that my plants are healthier and happier.”
Arthur says given a recent boom in “plant parenthood,” especially over the pandemic, many are looking for the most effective ways to keep their plants healthy.
“More and more homeowners today have house plants throughout their house. Almost every single square inch of my house has got a plant somewhere and I want to know that I’m taking care of them in the best way possible. And to do this without any chemicals, without any synthetic fertilizers, it just makes me feel better as a plant parent,” he says.
Arthur adds that as a plant enthusiast, he is proud to support Farm Radio International and their efforts to reduce food insecurity.
“As Canadians, we pride ourselves on our agriculture. We are farmers through and through. We have such a great agricultural educational base here. To share that with farmers in Africa through radio as a medium is such a privilege. As [people] who love plants, you understand the importance of taking care of communities through the use of growing crops,” he says.
“This really is a concrete way to kind of experience and participate both in the work of helping others in the world grow more food and meet their food security goals but also to have enjoyment of plants in their lives and just linking all these dimensions of life together,” adds Perkins.
