Farmers in drought hit Laikipia shift from maize to more lucrative coffee growing
Muturi Mwangi -KNA
Laikipia County which is a dry land has been traditionally known for livestock rearin, however the norm is changing as farmers venture into highly priced coffee farming.
Amid the scorching sun, there are blossoming coffee bushes at the farm of Peter Kimani, a budding farmer in Tandare village in Kinamba ward.
Kimani, who has put his one and quarter acre piece of land into coffee farming, reveals he started in 2022 and after making his first sale from the crop, he has never turned back.
He says that maize has been a cash crop in the area for a long time, however due to good earnings from coffee, farmers are replacing maize with coffee with hope of making fortunes from the berries.
“Maize has been our cash crop for many years but now it has been replaced by coffee due to the good returns. With an acre of maize crop making a net profit of Sh30,000 annually and the same piece of land planted with coffee earns Sh 240,000, coffee is the best option,” says Kimani, as he shows this writer his well utilized piece of land.
He adds that the sales has increased tremendously and recently he pocked Sh.320,000
With unpredictable weather patterns in the county and coffee farming requiring an altitude of between 1000m and 2000m to grow well, the budding farmer who has nearly a thousand Batian variety coffee bushes says that they rely on shallow rains and dams to farm.
Kimani who is also the Secretary of Ng’arua Coffee Farmers’ Cooperative Society highlights that since they are yet to come up with their own factory, they use portable machines to remove the red husk, then wash and dry for market.
He says a kilo of parchment fetches at Sh330 while dried one goes for Sh200 at New Kenya Planters Cooperative Union (NKPCU).
“Since we do not have a processing factory it’s upon the farmers to do their pulping and dry then we sell the produce as members of the society aimed to get good returns,” notes Kimani.
He points out that, they discourage members from selling to brokers aimed for them to benefit from the cooperative society through advance pay and training, brokers have been frequenting the area from the counties of Nyeri, Kirinyaga and Nairobi.
Kimani is among hundreds of farmers across the six wards of Sossian, Githiga, Marmanet, Igwamiti, Ol Moran and Ngobit in Laikipia county who had depended on maize farming but now embraced the top-rated coffee farming to turn around their economic fortune.