South of Luxor, where the green of the valley meets the yellow of the desert, or El Hagar as the people of Upper Egypt call it, is Musna, a small bio-fertilizer factory.
Musa Khalil, CEO and co-founder of Musna, stands among his team in a black T-shirt that resembles the uniform of Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg. Biofertilizers.
The idea is simple, and involves taking the waste from the biofuel production rooms that began to spread across the farmland surrounding the ancient Egyptian city and treating it to turn it into organic compost.
35 million tons of agricultural waste in Egypt
But the small Musna can produce 250,000 liters of organic fertilizer a month, and it won after four years, Khalil said in an interview with “CNN Al-Ektisadiya” “There are more than 35 million tons of agricultural waste. In Egypt, because it is dumped on both sides of the Nile, the canals and As it is burnt near roads, most of it is disposed of in wrong ways, causing health and environmental problems. At Musna, we collect and recycle agricultural waste. Liquid organic fertilizers.”
Nob, Mo and Waj are the brand names of the most common muzna products, and they each work differently on plant growth. Some work to strengthen seeds, while others promote fruit or plant growth.
According to Khalil, organic fertilizers help increase yields by 25 percent and help farmers save five percent of the water they use to irrigate land, but more importantly, they reduce the use of chemical fertilizers.
Success in increasing production of organic fertilizers by 25%
Nubian Ibrahim, who farms his land located in Al-Maris village on the west bank of the Nile in Luxor Governorate, told “CNN Al-Ektisadiya” that he started using organic fertilizers a year ago. It helped him increase productivity by 25 percent, and he also… reduced the use of chemical fertilizers by 70 percent. He said, “I now use only the nitrogen I need to strengthen the crops in Egypt.”
Since the Aswan High Dam was built in the middle of the last century, silt deposits from the Nile have been stopped, so most Egyptian farmers use nitrogen. The use of chemical fertilizers began in Egypt in the mid-1970s. This coincided with the economic openness policy adopted by the government under former President Anwar Sadat and the population explosion Egypt witnessed.
Ibrahim expressed his intention to stop using nitrogen as soon as possible if it is proven that the natural fertilizer he uses to farm without using chemical fertilizers completely has nitrogen content of 50 per thousand.
Muzna currently supplies more than four thousand gallons of organic fertilizers to customers in thirteen governorates distributed in Upper Egypt and the Delta, and Khalil has made no secret of his grand ambition to reach a larger number of consumers and export to African countries, perhaps all countries. The world, as he put it, concluded by saying, “We believe that Egypt’s agricultural sector must shift to adopt sustainable agricultural practices, such as rationalizing water and abandoning the use of chemical fertilizers.”
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