FarmBizAfrica, with its agenda of reporting ways for farmers to double production and reduce costs and find markets for their crops, is launching a series of farm tours to the best and most profitable farm innovations it reports.
The tours which will take place across Kenya have been designed to give farmers hands-on experiences on everything they need to make changes in their own farms and give them a big jump in expertise and knowledge.
Researchers have found that farmers’ tours and training events increase farmers’ incomes by an average of 86%. For this coming month, our quest to increase your farm profits begin with trips to teach farmers how to make bamboo vinegar that creates fertiliser and slashes pesticide costs then move to how to create virtually-free high protein chicken feed with duckweed and black flies on your own farm and end with how to double coffee earnings by processing your own coffee.
7th March 2025: Making fertiliser and pesticide with wood vinegar
Our first training will be on how to use wood vinegar to make a foliar spray that increases vegetable growth by 20.2 per cent while halving disease and pest attacks.
This will be held on 7th March when we will be visiting the Woodlands 2000 Trust in Isinya.
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Guided by the Cookswell Kenya team, the makers of energy-saving jikos and kilns, we will spend half a day learning how to:
- Choose the right bamboo/wood and prepare it to make vinegar.
- How to collect the bamboo vinegar/ tar and store it.
- The various uses of bamboo/wood vinegar in agriculture.
- How to collect the charcoal/biochar made from making bamboo vinegar and how to use it.
Farmers will be required to arrive at 8 am at the Woodlands 2000 Trust, which is located in Kisaju, Kajiado County 55 km away or about an hour’s drive from Nairobi.
If you want to be one of the farmers who join us, call George on 0718629239 or pay a Sh800 registration fee through Mpesa to Clarise at 0792174540.
13th March 2025: Growing azolla and black soldier flies
On Thursday, 13th March, we will be visiting a chicken farm in Othaya, in Nyeri County, that has reduced its chicken feed costs by 50 per cent by growing azolla water weed and rearing black soldier flies.
A free source of protein that can be grown forever azolla has 19-35 per cent protein content.
Black soldier flies, which are grown on the cheap by feeding them on organic material, offer an equal amount of protein, meaning they can replace more expensive proteins such as soybeans, omena, fishmeal, and commercial feeds.
“Chicken feed prices have gone up by more than 30 per cent in the last half-a-decade in Kenya. If we hadn’t started to grow azolla and rear Black soldier flies, we would have been out of business,” explained the farm’s 26-year-old founder, Alex Mauna.
If you want to be one of the farmers who join us, call George on 0718629239 or pay a Sh1,200 registration fee through Mpesa to Clarise at 0792174540. On registration, our team will contact you to share directions, organise your arrival at our meeting point, and share an information pack on the tour.
22nd March: Kenton Golden Coffee
On Saturday, March 22nd, we will be visiting Kenton Golden Coffee in Karatina, a small, youth-led coffee value-addition company that is earning Sh200 per kilogram for its coffee, which is Sh90- Sh110 more than Kenyan coffee farmers earn for their unprocessed cherries.
Learn from the best on how to maximise your coffee earnings through a tour of their facilities where they will walk us through how they harvest, process, roast and package their coffee cherries, the equipment they use, how and where they source it, the secrets of production, and how they package and market the roasted coffee as their loved and in-demand specialty coffee.
“We have moved from processing about half of the cherry from our farms to all of it. We currently have 50 bags of parchment stored and awaiting processing. This ensures we never run out of coffee to supply our steadily climbing customer base. Our clients are mainly friends, colleagues, and people who come across our online pages. We also have a few buyers outside the country who buy our beans to crash with their espressos,” Ken Mithamo, the company co-founder, informed.
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We will meet in Nairobi to travel together to their processing facility, which is about two hours away in Karatina. This is where they wet mill their cherries to green parchment. We will then travel to where they roast the green beans, 45 minutes away in Kiambu, before finishing off our tour at their Kahawa Wendani packaging and coordination facility, 30 minutes away. We encourage car sharing for this tour.
The cost of registration is Sh3,000. If you want to be one of the farmers who join us, please send your registration fee by Mpesa to Clarise at 0792174540. Upon registration, our team will contact you to organise your arrival at our meeting point and to share an information pack on the tour.
If you have any questions or would like more information on any of our tours, please call George on 0718629239.