Farmers who ignore weather advice lose millions, says Kenya Met

“Especially for the farmers, why it is important to follow the updates, in February this year, we said that the onset was going to be realised earlier than we had anticipated,” said Hannah.

“We told them to plant early, but most of them said they do not plant in February, because they do not plant then, while we had already said that the rainfall distribution would be poor in April and May.”

“It would have been prudent for them to have planted as early as February when the rains started, to avoid losses. Those who planted in February have actually harvested well. If they had heeded to the information, maybe there would not have been losses as we have seen,” said Hannah.

FarmBizAfrica confirmed this exact pattern across farmers. Joseph Kariuki, who planted in Kitale in February when the rains started said he had still got 20 bags per acre, despite the drought.

“The impact has not been as tough for those who planted during the first rains, they are better off. They will at least get some harvest. For this year, the first rains in Kitale appeared in February. Those who planted maize during that time will harvest normally.”

“I do not just wait for April rains, sometimes I prepare my farm as early as December, immediately after the short planting season, and take advantage of first rains due to changing weather patterns, said Joseph.

By contrast, Thomas Kiplagat, who planted maize in Uasin Gishu and Trans Mara in April and May said he had lost Sh7.4m from his 240 acres. “We were hoping the rains will go on as usual, but then they stopped, soon after we had done top-dressing,” he said.

The warning from Kemya Met comes as FarmBizAfrica today launches a free weather service for farmers, giving village-level forecasts for 16 days ahead with agricultural advice on which days are best for planting, top dressing, spraying, and harvesting.

These detailed local forecasts are essential to reducing farming risk and wasted costs, with Hannah explaining that extreme conditions can be very local or quite sudden. Weather can also create other impacts on food, and cause other weaknesses to become more damaging, with farmers reporting that crops and livestock yields have also declined on worsening diseases and pests on rising temperatures, at the same time as Kenya has banned many pest controls without replacements.

This additional factor of worsening diseases has played out in multiple disease outbreaks from June to September.

At the same time, said Hannah, the greater heat has caused additional moisture stress for crops, sharply increasing the need for mulching and moisture retention measures for soils.

The total amount of rain or total length of drought was not the only weather that affects farmers, sometimes severely, she said. Farmers can also lose crops if the rain comes at the ‘wrong time’ even when it is normal or above average.

“Rainfall is just one of the many factors that affect crop production and for rainfall, in terms of seasonal forecast, we just do not look at the forecast alone, but the distribution throughout the season.”

“Like, are we going to have very intense rainy days, with few but prolonged dry spells, or are we going to have prolonged dry spells, or are we going to have prolonged rainfall with shorter dry spells in between, like 2025,” she said.

All of these patterns have different ways of damaging farm earnings unless they are planned for.

“What happens is that when you have intense rains in a few days followed by prolonged dry spells it means that even though the rain might be above average, it is not sufficient for the crops to grow.”

“Sometimes, we have the rain being spatial, in that some areas receive rainfall while in the nearby areas, it is not raining,” she said.

Similarly with timing: “When we have rainfall, for example what happened in March, April and May this year, the rain came in mid-February increasing in March and April, and it decreased in May. This is what we call temporal distribution.”

“With this, you find that one month has heavy rainfall, and the next one completely has no rainfall, and that is when the crops are supposed to be getting into a critical stage. This is why we look at both temporal and spatial when it comes to crop productivity,” she said.

For the June to September period, “this, coupled with El Nino which, as I said, led to depressed rainfall in Western Kenya and North Rift, has now made the situation worse, because we are not having the rains we are used to and we are having more than average temperatures that are reducing water available for crop growth.”

However, the weather extremes are not only being caused by El Niño, she said.

“We can say, in general, that we have been having more extreme weather events and I can give a specific example of what happened on March 6, this year, where there was above average rainfall where we had rain of over 100ml in 24 hours causing massive destruction in Nairobi and other parts of the country. This had nothing to do with El Nino as it was caused by other factors that we consider when issuing weather and climate information,” she said.

For farmers, FarmBizAfrica is now providing 16-day weather forecasts for the are of 20km around their farme, with farming advice to minimise the damage caused by mismatched weather.

The knowledge centre also provides a farm planning tool, HarvestMAX, that chooses the best crops for the soil and weather forecast for farmer’s individual farms and produces a business and agricultural plan, including risk measures and back up plans.