Farming fads keep changing

The coming of the long rains, albeit late, has been welcomed with joy in Murang’a.

Farming is of course the lifeblood of the place, and the erratic weather patterns are always a source of grief. I spent some time in Kangema last week where I had gone to attend a relative’s funeral.

Though the constituency is known to be the breeding ground of traders and businessmen who have carved out a big slice of Nairobi, it is a typically rural area like the rest of Murang’a where people make their primary livelihood from the land.

I am sentimental about Kangema because it is my mother’s birthplace. I can’t begin to count the members of extended family I encountered there and the many happy hugs from old aunts and uncles and cousins, some of who I was meeting for the first time. They are all warm, generous folk who are without drama.

The funeral was of my mum’s stepmother, who had died at the ripe old age of 101. Her many generations of offspring are enough to populate a sizeable chunk of an electoral ward in Kangema.

I had hoped to link up with my friend and lawyer Muturi Kigano, who is a Kangema native, and who was sure to spruce up my visit with an update of local politics. After handily winning the Jubilee nomination, he is virtually guaranteed to become the next Member of Parliament for the area. He will be stepping into big shoes. This used to be the fiefdom of the late John Michuki, who remains a legend in Murang’a. As it were, Kigano was a close friend and ally of the minister.

LESS ENDOWED

My actual rural constituency is Maragwa, a less endowed place compared to Kangema. When I stopped there, villagers were upset because the local water supply had not been working for days. Luckily, the heavy rains meant their water tanks were full for the time being. The failure of the short rains late last year had come as a great inconvenience to the locals and affected the rural economy quite negatively.

Over the years, coffee and tea are no longer reliable cash cows for small farmers. In fact, a lot of the coffee bushes got uprooted as people planted bananas or horticultural crops. Bananas, however, rely on plenty of water and the failure of rains affects the quality and size of the fruit. A mysterious fungal disease had also ravaged the plants sometime back, I was told. Today, the sector that brings in good money for the villagers is dairy farming. Even the smallest plot of land has a thriving zero-grazing enterprise going on.

It helps that Murang’a Governor Mwangi wa Iria has invested a great deal of county resources in the dairy sector. (He adopted the name Wa Iria as a nod to this focus and his previous career background in the industry.)

I noticed numerous milk collection centres and several cooling plants across the county. The Brookside Dairy company has also a big local collection presence. However, the farmers make a strong case about the need for the big marketers and processors to improve milk farm prices. There is also the other problem of seasonal supply and demand imbalances, which affect prices.

PROCESSING PLANT

Macadamia nuts also give good returns for those who have invested in the trees. There is a huge processing plant just near Maragwa town that was put up by Equity Bank founder Peter Munga. But what surprised me is that a fruit I have always looked at with disdain, the avocado, is minting serious money for peasants.

There is a particular fast-growing variety much favoured by buyers that everybody seems to be planting in the area. Though the fruit is native to Mexico (I don’t know about maize), it does very well in Murang’a and areas with similar soils.

Some of my relatives tried to coax me into putting money into these ventures. Unfortunately, I am not much of a farmer. Again, I know it is not just prices that are cyclical. Farming fads keep changing in my rural constituency. Today it is macadamia nuts and avocadoes, tomorrow it will be something else. I have seen people nearly bankrupted after investing enormous sums in a crop that in the next season has no market. Well, I guess that is the nature of risk.

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