Markets

An NGO has begun buying macadamia, doubling the earnings of farmers who previously relied on exploitative middlemen as the only buyers of their nuts. Selling their macadamia nuts to One Acre Fund, since 2022 over 20,000 macadamia smallholder farmers in Central Kenya are earning Sh130 for a kilogram of their nuts, a massive improvement from […]

Researchers have shown that Kenya’s arid and semi-arid areas have the ideal weather and soils to make the country a leading producer of date fruits whose imports have grown by triple figures in the last decade. Dates, or tendes as they are more commonly called, are among the first ever fruits to be eaten by

Kenya’s pyrethrum production is climbing rapidly, up 81 per cent in just five years, to 1.68MT last year, and now earning farmers half a billion shillings a year as they move back into the once-dying agriculture sub-sector. In 2023 the amount of land that farmers put under pyrethrum more than doubled from the previous year

An 80-tonne processing capacity factory is creating new markets for 2,250 smallholder contracted farmers in Kisii County rescuing them from a lack of markets. Kisii County is synonymous with banana production. The county has 6,350 hectares under banana production producing 359,600 tonnes of the fruit annually. According to the county’s former governor James Ongwae, up

Sugarcane farmers are staying trapped in sugar as their incomes slump, using often rich agricultural land for the cane, out of generational loyalty, practical lock-ins to millers’ contracts, loans, and inputs, and the challenges of finding their own markets for other crops. The result, as many wait months for slow payments, is a trap that

A university in Nyeri has joined a global consortium of agricultural centres to develop a farming package that uses three crops to help each other, slashing input costs, and tripling outputs in 12 months of constant sales. The package is now being launched to Kenyan farmers complete with markets for the chia seeds, oyster mushrooms,

Snail slime is set to be among the fastest-rising skin care products with its market set to expand by 5.8 per cent in every one of the next 10 years to reach $2.40 billion. This is being driven by rising consumer awareness and demand for cosmetics that naturally and ‘cleanly’ fix the skin.  In the

A Kirinyaga farmer is earning Sh190,000 from his eighth-acre plot every four months after pivoting from growing low-earning bananas and sugarcane to thorned melons. Stanley Thuranira has set aside an eighth of his four-acre piece of land in Kutus to grow the African thorned melon. Towards the end of August, September, October, and early November

The introduction of silkworms feeding on drought-tolerant castor plants has opened year-round earnings for farmers in Kenya’s arid and semi-arid areas from the world’s most in-demand textile. Castor plant leaves provide the perfect food for Samia ricini or Philosamia ricini silkworms which make eri silk. According to the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) information

Kenyan farmers could soon be producing stevia– a high-earning herb with the fastest growing market in the world– for export as the leading global stevia producer is rumoured to be returning to Kenya. FarmBizAfrica reveals the tough journey that collapsed three partners’ first foray into the Kenyan market. The global stevia market has grown by