Women who farm for a living

For Mixa Foods and Beverages to be the profitable business that it is now, Herrine Omenda had to nurture the crops on her farm as much as she did her five-year-old daughter. Barren virgin land along the little known Nyamasaria River in Kisumu County, capital of Sh70,000 to buy a fuel-powered pump and a few seedlings marked the start of her life as a farmer. Herrine recalls her modest beginnings: “It was just one acre of land, a pump, a sprinkler, pipes… It was hard and I had to be patient.”

Like many women, Herrine’s first challenge was that she did not have land for farming. But when she saw the land by the river, despite the fact that it was notoriously hard-to-farm black cotton soil, she was sold. “I saw the water, and I thought ‘I can farm the whole year even with little rain’. And food has never been an out-of-season product” she says. She approached the owners on whether she could lease it. Baffled at why anyone would want such an unattractive piece of land, the owners asked her for Sh6,000 a year, or just Sh500 a month.

Then she went about setting her company up. “There was the company whose name my husband conceived when he was in college. I think he did not know what to do with it until we started farming.”

Once everything was set up, she started grafting ordinary resilient mango and orange breeds with shorter life spans. The process of getting the seeds for the grafting was galling, but she did not mind. “I used to go to the market and collect the seeds people dropped after eating mangoes. These are what I planted to get the indigenous seeds that would later be grafted,” she says. The Sh200 orange and Sh150 mango seedlings fetched her about Sh10,000 in gross sales every week at the local market.

The process of grafting is as sensitive as it is laborious. “When the seeds have germinated, you uproot them, put them the black bags then make small incisions that you will later graft better breeds of the plant, then begin watching the plant until it grows.”

By 2009, she had earned enough to expand to three acres and buy the land. With more space, Herrine established an orchard where she planted peas, apples, sugarcane and mangoes.

VALUE ADDITION

But there was another challenge that was threatening her growth: produce from neighbouring Uganda. “The traders who would get their products from there would sell them at a very low prices compared to my products,” she says. Customers who knew the detail, care and dedication with which she grew her crops with still came to her, but Herrine still needed to figure out how to beat the competition.

One day, the solution hit her: Value addition. Being married to an engineer who made kitchen equipment such as potato choppers, she decided to induct him into her scheme. He made her a sugar cane crusher with which she started making sugarcane juice that was in demand from people with jaundice, a medical condition marked by yellowing of the skin or whiteness in the eyes.

The results were encouraging. “When I sold the sugarcane as a processed product I earned twice as much from it than I did while it was umprocessed,” she says. As income rose to as much as Sh90,000 a month on selling just one of her products, Herrine handed over management responsibilities to her husband as she enrolled for evening accounting classes.

Another challenge Herrine faced as a woman farmer was to learn to steel herself against naysayers and chauvinists. “Sometimes I walk into supermarkets and other companies when I am marketing my goods and people look at me and ask ‘are you a farmer?’ in a way that shows me they are not really looking for an answer to that question.”

Dr Mumbi Machera is a pig farmer who went into the business following a situation she – and many other women – have found themselves in. “I was widowed in 1998. My two children joined secondary school in 2006 and I would need money when they joined institutions of higher learning,” she says.

Born to a pig-farming father although she was a researcher by profession, Mumbi embarked on a two-year fact-finding mission to establish what sort of business would be a good fit for her. She settled on her roots: pig farming. Having observed her father’s business, she decided that she wanted a more organised, professional setup. Between 2006 and 2008, Mumbi’s visited established pig farmers and asked to be taught about how to take care of pigs.

“I learnt about the pig as an animal and knew that they become stressed too,” she explains. She also learnt that she needed to buy her first pigs when they were three months pregnant—just a month from delivery—and that while the animals fetched money in just six months of their life, they needed a lot of care. “You have to clip the canines of the piglets so that they don’t harm each other. They are prone to bone diseases so you have to inject them with potassium and iron; you have to spray to kill mites which usually cause wounds on their delicate skins; they like peace and get extremely stressed when exposed to noise. They also get pneumonia when they are young.”

She also consulted Farmers’ Choice about the stringent hygiene standards she needed to meet so that she could supply her animals to them, an inquiry that was answered with training.

NATURE AND NURTURE

In 2008 she took a Sh2 million loan to buy three acres of land in Embu and started Sunhupper Farm Products in 2008. “I was targeting Farmers’ Choice whose demand for pigs will never be met by all Kenyan farmers, and for that I needed access to Nairobi.” she says. She constructed her pens and bought three mothers, who were a month away from delivering.

Currently, the company sells about 40 to 45 pigs periodically to local farmers in Embu and to Farmers’ Choice. A pig weighing 65kgs costs about Sh8, 200, with the price rising with weight increase. However, those that weigh above 90kgs cost much less due to their high fat content.

In a month, she says, she spends about Sh50,000 to ensure that her pigs are comfortable and healthy.

While Mumbi has hired a farm manager and a handful more workers to look after the farm, she has to make calculations to control “nature and nurture of the pigs. You have to change the fathers because a boar cannot breed with its daughter because of genetic issues. You have to control how they breed otherwise they will be too many and you may not be able to feed them, as they eat throughout the day”, she said.

Mumbi confesses that while she has earned profits from her hard work, the price of feeds that keep fluctuating dents her pocket from time to time.

Mumbi has begun talking to the local elders to identify the neediest of households who she can give mother pigs, a little training on rearing the animals and let them earn some income. She also has her sights set high: “In a year I will be processing my own pork products,” she says.

Windsor Nyawira herds cattle in Machakos. She supplies milk to hotels, schools and other institutions in the area. Windsor, who is proprietor of Windsor Farm, believes agriculture is communal and can only succeed with proper relationships. She began breeding cattle on zero grazing in 2002 and she has worked hard to keep her clients. “We rely on word of mouth for everything and so I cannot compromise the quality of my milk. My clients have never come for milk and were turned away because of depleted stocks,” she says.

Windsor started her business on a three-quarter acre of land with one cow that she had bought for Sh40, 000. Now she has a herd of 30, out of which 13 are milked mechanically to produce as much as 250 litres a day.

Windsor does not consider herself a business woman until some of her ambitions are met.

“I will be in business when I start breeding my own cows, quality and resilient breeds,” she says.