POTATO FARMING IN KENYA

Potato farming is one of those businesses that can either make or break you. You can get good returns provided you are willing to learn how to navigate your way up or you can literary “burn” your whole investment in less than 3 months. Read the next few paragraphs to find out the truth about this age-old business idea.

Potato Farming In Kenya

Potatoes are highland crops and they grow well in most major parts of the nation including Molo, Kinangop, Taita Hills, Yatta, Timboroa and parts of Laikipia.

Step 1: Getting Started

The first step is to find land in one of the high production areas. If you live in Nairobi area then you can think of going to places like Kinangop or North Nyandarua (an hour’s drive from the City). Remember, you don’t have to be a land owner to get started as you can simply lease. Currently, the cost of leasing a good chunk of land in Nyandarua about 1 Kilometre from the tarmac is Ksh15,000 per year.

Tips For Picking Land For Potatoes

• Should not be too far from tarmac (1-2Km recommended)
• Look for one with reddish soil (toney)
• Avoid land with a bad history of potato production
• Avoid land that lies adjacent to a river to minimize chances of frost bite

Step 2: Prepare The Land

Now that you have found a nice piece of land, the next step is to till it and prepare furrows ready for planting. Here again you don’t have to do all the work yourself. You only need to hire a few village labourers and delegate the job to them. If you’re too busy with your current job or business, you can pick one of your idle uncles from the village and hire them as the farm manager.

Another thing to do is to get some manure. Manure is normally sold in lorries (mostly from Masai land) and a good load goes for Ksh20,000 delivered to your place.

Step 3: Buy Certified Seeds

You may be tempted to take a short-cut by buying seeds from other farmers but you should know that this is the biggest mistake that most farmers make. If you want to get the best harvest, then you have to get the best disease-free seeds. A good source of these seeds is The Kisima Foundation…this is an organization that allows you to even pay by Mpesa and they deliver right outside your farm. The average cost of a bag of certified potato seeds is Ksh3,000.

Tips For Buying Seeds

• Only buy certified seeds
• Talk to local farmers about which breeds do well in the area around your farm.
• Examples of potato breeds are Tigoni, Kenya Mpya, Asante and Shangi

Step 4: Plant and Wait For 90 Days

The good thing with potatoes is that they only take 90 days to mature. But in order for that to happen (and in order for the yield to be profitable) you need to ensure that your crop is well watered either through rain or irrigation. Also, be sure to apply DAP fertilizer in combination with manure. Take care of the farm by weeding it. Lastly, you will need to invest in chemicals and yield boosters – and these you can buy from the agrovet shops. 

Tips For Buying Chemicals

• Go for nematicides if you notice small wounds on potato roots
• Go for fungicides in case of signs of blight

Now from this point we can start talking business…

How To Get The Best Prices

It is one thing to plant potatoes; selling them and getting the best prices is another. Let me tell you something…in the potato world, there exists some sharp individuals called brokers.

They come with lorries and move from door to door buying farm produce at some punitive prices. The good thing with brokers is that they save the farmer the hassle of finding the market, but the bad thing is that the prices they give are sometimes unsustainable and that explains why many first-time potato farmers “burn”.

So what’s the secret to dealing with brokers? The first strategy is to plant your crop at around December so that you harvest it at around February or March when there is short supply and prices are favorable. For instance, right now as we write this a bag of potatoes is going for Ksh4,000 and above. However, the same bag of potato may fluctuate to as low as Ksh1,000 at the month of July.

Another strategy is that some government and non-goverment institutions are now building special granaries where you can keep your potatoes until the market stabilizes. You can take your produce there and hold until the ripple effects of a bumper harvest subside. But what if you don’t want to wait or play with the seasons? If you can’t beat them join them. Using the many sales and marketing skills we equip you with here , there is absolutely no reason why you should not look for your own market of potatoes. You simply need to approach fast-food chains, restaurants, schools, institutions etc and give them a good quote.

You can then hire a mguu kumi or mguu sita lorry and go back to the village where in addition to collecting your own produce you can link up with other farmers to fill up the lorry. This way, you will be in a position to dictate the price and you will be able to get better returns.

How Much To Invest

In total, you will require about Ksh80,000 for an acre of potatoes (from planting to harvesting).

How Much To Expect

The current market price for a sack of Shangi potatoes is Ksh4,000. An acre of land can produce 80 bags of potatoes in 3 months. So let’s do the math.

Ksh4,000 x 80 bags = Ksh320,000 (Revenue)

Ksh320,000 (Revenue) – Ksh80,000 (Expenses) = Ksh240,000 (Net Profit) in just 90 days.

Note that the recommended size of potato bag is 110Kilograms according to the National Potato Council of Kenya.

Final Word

Potato farming is a good venture. It is not a get-rich-quick scheme (though) and majority of first time investors may lose their money due to obvious mistakes. On a positive note, if you have read this article to the end you can now proceed to make an investment confident of making returns. All it takes is a bit of discipline, hard work and strategy.

WATER MANAGEMENT

This winter, the UK has suffered from severe weather conditions, storm surges and river floods. Many were affected and the economic damage is enormous. As in other cases of flooding around the world, Dutch water managers offered assistance, and talk emerged of the ‘Dutch approach’ to flooding as a solution. But what is it exactly that British water managers could learn from their Dutch colleagues, if anything?

Flood plain occupancy It is possible that the recent floods in the UK can be interpreted as indicators of climate change. But even if that is the case, changes in climatic conditions, rainfall intensities and flood frequencies likely offer only part of the explanation for the increased flood impacts. Equally important are human settlement and investment patterns, most notably in flood prone areas. If the situation in the UK is comparable to that in the Netherlands, then growing flood plain occupancy and increased investment in flood prone areas may be significant factors in explaining the large damage caused by the recent floods.

Spatial planning Flood risk management can thus not only be about the construction of innovative flood defenses, but should also involve spatial planning aimed at keeping economic activities out of flood prone areas. This has partially been achieved in the Netherlands. In flood plains along the main rivers (Rhine, Meuse) in particular, the Dutch spatial policy to inhibit development in flood plains along the main rivers has been quite successful, for instance by introducing a ‘water test’ that needs to be applied to every change in zoning plans. However, next to the sea coast, less success has been accomplished, and the Dutch continue to plan urban development there, sometimes in areas that are several meters below sea level.

Restoring and using natural dynamics Both in the UK and the Netherlands water managers have adopted and gained experience with what in the Netherlands has been dubbed space for water policies . They no longer exclusively fight against the water by constructing technical flood defense infrastructures, but also try to restore the natural water storage capacity of river systems by giving back reclaimed land to the river, creating retention areas and so on. The Dutch also started to experiment with using natural processes in their coastal defense strategies under the slogan ‘building with nature’. A good example of this is the so called sand motor, which revolves around sand supplication along the coast and helps reduce the energetic impact of tidal waves.

Water safety standards In spite of the many similarities between Dutch and British flood risk management, there are also striking differences, such as the safety standards that guide government action. For the urbanized western part of the Netherlands the coastal defense safety standard is 1: 10,000 years (which means that coastal defenses are designed to withstand sea flooding that is expected to occur only once in 10,000 years); by comparison, in the UK the coastal safety standard typically is 1:200 years (1:1000 for London). The safety standard along the Dutch main rivers is 1:1,250; in England this standard typically is 1: 100. The Dutch safety standards were formulated by the first Delta Committee. This committee was established in the aftermath of the 1953 storm surge, which also affected the UK. The second Delta Committee, which issued its report in 2008, argued that given the enormous growth of the GDP since 1953, Dutch flood safety standards should actually become more stringent by a factor of 10, which would imply a standard of 1:100,000 years for the coast. One can understand that from a Dutch point of view, flood safety standards in other countries, such as the UK and the US, appear relatively lax, even taking into account the unique geophysical and hydro logic circumstances in the Netherlands (1/3 of the territory is under sea level).

Flood insurance A second main difference is that unlike UK citizens, until recently the Dutch had no option to take out private flood insurance. Instead, the Dutch government may compensate for flood losses using the disaster fund, which is funded by general income tax. Only recently has one insurance company started to offer insurance policies in the Netherlands. As only a few have taken out insurance so far, the disaster fund will remain the main source for compensating flood losses. One of the potential drawbacks of introducing a private insurance system is that the government may feel tempted to no longer invest in flood protection infrastructure as the citizens already enjoy the benefits of an insurance system.

Regional water authorities Unlike most other countries, the Dutch have very powerful regional water authorities (known as ‘waterschappen’, or waterboards), whose jurisdiction is grounded in the Dutch constitution, a fact that has helped them survive attacks from various political parties and other regional governments, who regularly propose to abolish the regional water boards. What is probably more important however is that these water authorities have their own tax system, which enables them to collect the financial resources needed for the construction and maintenance of flood defense infrastructures and other tasks that have been allocated to them. Precisely because these authorities have a special status and their own tax base, the availability of sufficient financial resources for the construction and maintenance of flood protection infrastructure is guaranteed institutionally. This is quite different from the situation in the UK, where the Prime Minister was blamed for having cut the budgets for water safety.

Delta Program After the issuing of the report of the second Delta Committee in 2008, the Dutch national government launched the Delta Program , a large national program aimed at developing and implementing strategies to guarantee flood safety and availability of fresh water in the long run, taking into account the impacts of climate change. Financial resources were recognized as a crucial factor for success. Therefore, the national government, following the recommendations made by the committee, decided to establish a Delta Fund, which should guarantee that 1 billion euros can be spent yearly as from 2015, primarily to improve the national flood defense infrastructure.

Lessons? Clearly, the relative success of Dutch flood risk management should not only be explained by Dutch engineering expertise or newly introduced concepts of adaptive or eco-system based water management. The institutional characteristics of Dutch water resources management and specific ways of addressing water governance issues are equally important. Even though one should be careful with institutional transplantation as similar institutions might not be effective within a different context, the institutional mechanisms for generating sufficient financial resources are particularly worth looking at. Given the vulnerability of large parts of the UK to flooding, a specific flood protection tax or the creation of a national fund are worth considering. Of course, this also presumes a willingness to pay on the part of the population. There is no such thing as a free lunch, but going Dutch with the bill might be considered. 

Let's keep using and conserve water in everything we do for future..

Extracted from :water management

by Sander Meijerink and Dave Huitema.

THE IMPACT OF SOIL MANAGEMENT

For over a decade, CIAT has tested agronomic and soil management practices in Western Kenya. From minimum tillage to integrated soil fertility management, two trials, established in 2003, are the most comprehensive picture of tropical soil health that we have in Kenya. What these trials allow us to do is show-case changes in soil fertility and health – for example the impact of conservation measures like minimum tillage, manure application or green manure cover cropping – on soil fertility and crop yields, and what happens if these are absent. They also enable us to show the impact of cropping systems and rotations, providing farmers with advice about which mix of organic and mineral fertilizers can restore productivity to degraded soils, for example. These are not quick-fixes: they take time to develop, hence the importance of these long-term trials.
Over the years, the trials have been visited by hundreds of farmers, regional stakeholders, and students studying agronomy and soil health practices. They also provide a platform for students to pursue their BSc, MSc or PhD studies, and to dig into some of the fascinating aspects of soil biology and biodiversity. Farmers will often use technologies they are familiar with and are often be reluctant to try new technologies. Farmers need options as they are dealing with multiple constraints.

Lessons learned: what’s in it for farmers?

During the last field day, themed: “Research for Long-term crop productivity and Soil health” in July, more than 176 farmers, half of them women, came from various counties in Western Kenya together with local extension officers. The practices we have tested during the trials were showcased to farmers. What we have found during these long term trials and the feedback from farmers is that some technologies take a long time to yield results. Yet farmers cannot afford to wait for long if the technology comes with a yield penalty, or requires too many resources to start with. That’s why farmers were most impressed by methods they perceive as easy and affordable, which save time and boost yields. We also have to remember that farmers are dealing with multiple constraints. For example, they own small plots of land or have communal land ownership – and land inheritance issues greatly inhibit a farmer’s ability to try new technologies. Some farmers fear that others may later claim the land and this may lead to financial losses if they have invested heavily. Many farmers also highlighted that some new technologies are expensive to use, for example if significant amounts of commercial inputs have to be purchased, like mineral fertilizer, improved seeds, herbicides or pesticides. Loans are often expensive and expensive or risky to take, unless farmers are insured against potential losses. Demonstrating technologies that work. Demonstrating different technologies and results. What technologies that have worked?

Farmers will often use technologies they are familiar with. For example, for livestock feed, they will use Tithionia, a shrub for livestock feed, instead of the flowing plant Tephrosia, to plant in rotation with other crops to boost yields, because they know it has multiple uses: for livestock feed for goats and because it can prevent termites from attacking the crops. They are only familiar with Tephrosia to capture fish, and so are not likely to use it as livestock feed. A key messages for farmers is that mineral fertilizer use application alone is not sustainable. Maintaining soil health long-term requires returning organic matter back to the soil; be it as green manure – special, often leguminous plants grown to produce organic matter to feed the soil – soybean, farm yard manure or compost. In addition, good agronomic practices – timely planting and weeding – are essential to make chemical fertilizers more efficient. Soils with low organic matter content may also be unresponsive to mineral fertilizers and first of all need to be rehabilitated by adding organic resources.
Conservation agriculture, which among other things means disturbing (tilling) the soil as little as possible, can prevent further destruction of the precious soils, ensuring higher and more stable yields while reducing production costs and increasing labor productivity.
Conservation agriculture also includes protecting the soil surface by retaining crop residues like maize stover, to reduce erosion by fast-moving water or wind. This conservation soil moisture can also reduce weed growth and increase the rate of water infiltration into the soil.
Farmers may be reluctant to try these new technologies – but seeing is often believing.
Soil management is not a quick-fix: hence the importance of these long-term trials.