Farm that won me a top award

The vehicle raises a cloud of dust as the Seeds of Gold team drives on a murram road into the hilly villages of Mukurwe-ini in Nyeri County.

Soon we arrive at our destination, on Grace Wangechi Migwi’s farm. Grace is clad in a white overcoat and black shoes. She is on her poultry farm feeding her 1,200 layers.

Grace topped the women category in the National Farmers Awards Scheme, an initiative aimed at repositioning agriculture as a business in the country.

The competition is mainly sponsored by agro-inputs firm, Elgon Kenya Ltd, in partnership with Ministry of Agriculture.
Besides chickens, the farmer keeps dairy cows, fish and grows coffee.

Sometime in 2014, Grace was a subsistence farmer growing crops and keeping indigenous chickens when she decided to venture into commercial poultry farming to make some income.

She started with 50 chicks, a business that has now grown into an expansive venture attracting farmers from in and out of Nyeri for lessons.

“I bought the 50 chicks from Kenchic at Sh100 but after about a month, people started to ask if they can buy them. I sold them at Sh300 each,” says Grace, noting she ploughed Sh10,000 in the venture.

Bouyed by the profit, the farmer bought more chicks, increasing the population of the birds over the years to the current 1,500 chicks, which sells at Sh300 each after about a month.

Her 1,200 layers offer her more than 900 eggs every day. She sells over 100 trays at Sh300 each to her numerous clients, mainly shops, while households buy them at Sh360 a tray or Sh12 per egg.

Grace formulates her own feeds, but not on her farm.

She buys feed materials that include maize germ, wheat pollard, sunflower, bone meal and fish meal, at a go-down in Thika and they are mixed there for her, a new trend farmers in the region are adopting.

“I save Sh450 on a 70kg bag of feeds. Commercial ones go for Sh3,250 while the self-made feeds at Sh2,800.”

The poultry venture has given birth to her fish, pig and dairy farms, which occupy various spaces on her four acres.

On her dairy farm, she keeps one milking cow, a heifer and a bull. The cow produces 18 litres of milk a day.

“I use waste from the poultry farm to feed the fish and pigs cutting down my costs,” says Grace.

ENHANCING FOOD SECURITY

She has a stock of 1,500 fish which she keeps in a pond on the far end of her farm. The monosex tilapia fish is currently four months old and she sells at Sh300 per kilo at eight months.

She has five mature pigs and 22 piglets after selling off 18 last two months at Sh250 per kilogramme.

“I normally attend a lot of seminars across the county to get knowledge on disease outbreaks, treatment and prevention and farming generally.”

Besides poultry, pig and fish, Grace is also a beekeeper, having started the venture over two years ago. From her four hives, she harvests over 50kg of honey and sells at Sh600 per kilo.

“I was given a hive by the Green Belt Movement, and I have grown the business since then to three hives.

“I harvest 8kg of honey that I sell at Sh800 per kilo. The bees I keep help pollinate the trees I grow and the coffee plantation.” She has more than 480 bushes of coffee and last season, harvested 2,000kg earning Sh152,000.

Her challenges include poor market, especially for eggs where middlemen control the prices per tray.

“No one should control prices for what a farmer produces because he needs to make profit at the end of the day. We just want to be allowed to sell our produce at our own prices without interference,” reckons Grace, who generates biogas on her farm for domestic use.

So what made her emerge top in the women’s category? The judges lauded her for recycling poultry waste to feed the pigs and fish.

“I collect it, dry and use it to feed the pigs, my 1,500 fish, dairy cows and also I sell Sh500 per bag to farmers,” she says, adding that the judges also lauded her chicks business, in particular, how she efficiently buys day-old birds, broods them and sells after a month.

They further noted she was running her agribusiness competently by ensuring she is making profit and enhancing food security.

Robert Thuo, the immediate Agriculture executive in Nyeri, says for any farmer to succeed in agribusiness, they need to ensure soil and water conservation structures are in place on the farm.

“One should also embrace modern technologies while making cost benefit analysis which contributes to the growth of the enterprise,” he says, adding animal houses and structures should also be well done and maintained alongside proper recordkeeping.