Sweet Potatoes
The most common varieties that Kenyan sweet potato farmers grow are white, red and purple. The yellow-fleshed sweet potato's popularity has increased, due to nutritionists promoting it as a source of vitamin A, which is lacking in the Kenyan diet. The vitamin A deficiency is not fatal, but it leaves the immune system depleted and susceptible to measles, malaria and diarrhea. The deficiency also may cause blindness.
Despite efforts to develop completely resistant plants, little has been achieved so far. Therefore, attention is turning to pseudo-resistance, which includes mitigating weevil damage through deeper storage roots formation and short-season varieties, which are exposed to weevil infestation for less time. Where farmers piecemeal their sweet potato harvest, there can be up to a 10 percent crop loss due to disease and weevils. Beetle pests can completely destroy sweet potato plantations.
Read more about this topic: Agriculture In Kenya
Famous quotes containing the words sweet and/or potatoes:
“With sweet May dews my wings were wet,
And Phoebus fir’d my vocal rage;
He caught me in his silken net,
And shut me in his golden cage.
He loves to sit and hear me sing,
Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;
Then stretches out my golden wing,
And mocks my loss of liberty.”
—William Blake (1757–1827)
“Who lives longer: the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or the man who lives on roast beef, water and potatoes till ninety-five? One passes his twenty-four months in eternity. All the years of the beef-eater are lived only in time.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)