Once upon a time a man married two Marys, which is something you can do in Kenya. The man passed away but his two wives, the Marys, lived on and prospered while growing finger millet.

Finger millet is a traditional crop of Eastern Africa and once grew abundantly in the Western Kenya near the town of Kakamega. But in the 1990s farmers replaced it with maize. That was a pity as finger millet is incredibly nutritious, grows really well in these parts and can command about twice the price at market as other crops.

So the local agricultural institute started looking for some forward-thinking farmers to plant some finger millet and the two Marys signed up. They learned about planting finger millet in rows rather that just throwing the seeds and they learned of a variety called U15 which was somewhat resistant to local diseases. For a few years, they were involved in the finger millet project and they loved finger millet so much they continued to plant it and tell their neighbours about who.

The Marys showed us some recently harvested finger millet in a storeroom. As we were heading out to their fields a daughter of one of the Marys called me over to show me her pigs, which were her pride and joy. Her nieces, Daisy and Evelyn, arrived home from school and were curious to find a white man amongst the pigs.

We drove out to the Marys’ unharvested finger millet field, next to the local school which was just getting out. The children crowd around the fence to see the visitors and seemed to be quite amused with the odd looking foreigner. I I walked up to greet them. They were keen to practice English. ‘What is your name?’, they asked. I told them and then I ran off to the field. As we drove off at least 50 children were crowding along the fence yelling ‘Mike, Mike, Mike’.

All images used on this page were photographed by Michael Major for the Crop Trust and used here under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.