By Antynet Ford

Retired Siaya teacher Victor Otieno Maura is mobilising farmers across Siaya and Nyanza in a bid to build enough palm oil production to support a local processing factory, following his own gains, earning Sh2.1m a year from just 40 oil palm trees, in the county. 

Victor, who has now mentored more than 70 farmer in the region, planted his own oil palm seedlings in 2016 while still teaching secondary school. At the time, oil palm was unfamiliar in his area and he began with just 20 trees.

But the natural suitability of the crop to the area and its high earning have since seen him expand rapidly and now move  to organise aggregation for investors who are willing to start processing in the area if the farmers can generate sufficient volume.

“Companies like Bidco Africa have told me to encourage farmers so they can build a processing factory here,” he said.

Oil palm remains rare in Siaya County, which is dominated by maize and sugarcane. Over time, however, small numbers of farmers had planted seedlings, but many abandoned the crop after failing to extract crude palm oil.

“I am preparing an inventory of farmers who already have palm trees but don’t know how to process the oil. I want us to register our own cooperative for palm oil producers,” he said.

Victor said the region has more trees than people realise, but without processing knowledge and organised marketing, fruit bunches often go to waste.

He has now mentored more than 70 farmers with the trees in place.

By formally registering growers into a cooperative, he hopes the farmers can pool harvests, access shared processing equipment and present credible production figures to potential factory investors.

But “most people here in the village are not yet informed about the benefits of palm oil,” he said.

Victor is also targeting schools as mobilisation hubs.

“I am planning to travel to Nairobi to get a letter from the CS directing education officers so I can talk to teachers across Nyanza about palm farming,” he said.

He believes teachers can introduce the crop to households and encourage structured planting across communities. By speaking through school networks, he hopes to accelerate adoption beyond isolated individuals and build coordinated regional production.

To formalise the initiative, Victor said, “I have visited the governor and the County Executive Committee Member for Agriculture. They even visited my farm, but the process is still taking too long.”

“The element of corruption has made the integration process hard. They keep taking me round and round.”

For this reason, he now plans to seek support at national level, as he continues organising growers independently.

Moving to commercialised production requires farmer knowledge, he said, as he found with his own trees, from which he is now earning millions of shillings. Initially, “I did not know well how to take care of them,” he said. “I was just trying something different as a retirement project.”

For several years, the trees produced little income. He struggled with pruning, harvesting and especially processing the fruit. Like many early adopters in the region, he initially lacked the technical knowledge required to extract oil.

The turning point came when he mastered processing.

“The berries are harvested from the trees, ground using a motor and pestle, washed in hot water, sieved and then boiled for about six hours before we get the final product,” he said.

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“After learning how to process it, that is when I started producing oil and later started getting profit from it,” he said.

Today, he owns 40 oil palm trees and harvests three times a year. Each mature tree produces several bunches per season. He processes the fruit into crude palm oil and supplies customers in Siaya, Kisumu, Homa Bay and Nairobi.

The operation earns him about Sh2.1m a year.

Now, he is no longer expanding his own acreage, but building numbers sufficient to anchor a factory.

“I am struggling to reach these levels on my own now, but I know this crop has a future,” he said. “If we bring farmers together, palm oil can transform livelihoods in this region.”

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