Substandard, fake and ill seeds will be a thing of the past after the country rolls out its plan to digitisation of the seed system. The development will see through the automation of seed certification and plant variety protection system.
The initiative comes at a time when farmers are contending with high cases of fake seeds doing rounds in the market. This they say is courtesy to the manual system which is easily infiltrated by unscrupulous individuals out to blemish farming.
In addition, the manual system has been associated with delays, documentation errors, inefficiencies and longer processing time. The digital technology is hoped to correct the anomalies in the system into shape.
“Seed system in developed countries have been automated and Kenya is now joining South Africa and Zambia by automating our seed certification processes,” reported a source.
The process of seed certification is divided into three parts- variety description which results in development of the variety descriptors, field inspections which ascertains the trueness to type of the crop variety, and seed testing which guarantees the seed purity and germination that it has to must meet for it to be released to the market.
The new system will have enormous benefits such as faster registration of seed crops and lead to ease of registering crop varieties for distinctness, uniformity and Stability.
