Vihiga Farmers making 3k a day on ten-by-seven metres greenhouses growing tomatoes and Zucchini

A boda-boda, which has become a choice retirement plan for many villagers lately, can only bring in about an income of three hundred to five hundred bob, after the rider has paid himself and deducted expenses. And you haven’t factored in the stress of dealing with traffic and county cops, who are always arresting the bikers or the defaulters who will have you spening more on calls than your income.

Those who retire to farming, often choose dairy buying one or two grade cattle and put to plow the family land cultivating nappier, putting the remainder under maize and a few other crops. But that is a very labor-intensive undertaking, especially for a retiree. There’s the waking up at five or six to milk the cows, taking the milk to the dairy, cleaning up the cowshed after, and then going to cut and get more fodder.

“The day of that mzee will be practically over; and he will be very tired and will hardly be enjoying his sunset years. He would be left with no choice but to hire a permanent farmhand and pay him out of his pension,” said Robert Kivayiru Mulemi, one of Vihiga county farmers who thinks he has struck gold. Mr Mulemi says, smacking his calloused hands bruised by experience. “But look at the greenhouse on the other hand; once you have overcome the initial challenges, you are practically your own boss, working at your own pace.”

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He says he makes a clean three thousand bob on an area of about ten-by-seven metres during the peak season of his purely organic tomatoes. “The buyers wake me up in the morning when they know I am harvesting. Tell me what will make you that income from an area like this in the village?”

open secret

He is not an isolated case. Across the valleys of the stony hills of Maragoli Mukayagi Ngoda, a retiree consultant professional agriculturalist and literature and music enthusiast in his seventies is also pulling a similar trick. These two oldies, who were part of a failed experiment of multimillion-dollar greenhouses, Israeli technology, and all manner of fertilizers, discovered a secret bug in our soils and used cement bags, plastic sheets, and rabbit urine to beat it.

Over the years, Vihiga County has seen an unprecedented increase in fragmentation of inherited family land that has seen most people setting up new homes on what would pass for ‘plots’ that they inherited from their parents, and which is forcing residents to have a mind-shift from the traditional farming that they grew up with in the 1970s and 1980s where their mothers nurtured them on uji made out of free-range finger millet grown on the banks of their chrystaline streams and embrace experimental farming methods that will make their tiny shambas more productive and profitable.

Traditional vegetables that used to grow wild, and which were viewed as food for the poor, are now in high demand at the market at the growing town centres, fetching good prices for those farmers who can cultivate them commercially, unlike in the past when seeds were simply thrown in the banana patch behind the kitchen hut and nature left to take its course. The land too, due to over-cultivation, has been depleted of nutrients; meaning that in order to keep on producing farmers have to be innovative. It is the reason Out of theBox set out to find out the stories of two such farmers, who are slowly but surely revolutionizing the approach to farming in the county.

First grafted avocado in Western Kenya

Our first stop was in Vumale village, on the outskirts of Mbale town, where we were going to visit Mr Ngoda, who claims the first grafted avocado in Western Kenya grows on his piece of land. An eraly adopter of technology, Mr Ngonda is very passionate about finding practical solutions to problems facing farmers in Vihiga and how the county residents can keep hunger at bay using innovation.

It had rained and the ground was soggy when we visited, but it was apparent that all was preceding on course in his greenhouse, despite the weather, the healthy rows of tomato plants preparing to flower. We were curious to know why he had chosen tomato, known to be a very delicate crop, especially so in an area where the skies open up during the rainy season.

He says one of the major attractions with tomatoes is the ready market and the good return on investment if done right. “People are always in need of tomatoes, be it restaurants, schools and other institutions around here, including the market women selling in the stalls in Mbale. If you have them in good quantities and of good quality you will never lack where to sell throughout the year.”

He tells us that during the previous season, after word went round, the buyers would come to him on boda-bodas for orders, and not the other way round. But it wasn’t smooth sailing at the beginning. One of the biggest mistakes Ngoda and his friends made with tomatoes at the beginning was to plant them directly into the soil in the greenhouses. It was a disaster.

Amiran Greenhouses

“When we started this project there were a number of us, and we were a little overambitious. We made mistakes. Many mistakes. We did not know that there are very many microbes in the soils of this county that are very difficult to control, and they will give you very many problems with your tomatoes. We learned the hard way at the beginning, when we lost most of our crop. I put in about two-hundred thousand bob. I never made a cent back.”

When they had just started off, the Israeli Ambassador came to the village to launch the Amiran greenhouses confident of the Israeli technology, along with some farming experts to talk to farmers about how they could improve what they were doing. After the failure, they even sent the experts to oversee the next crop step by step, yet it resulted in a similar fate.

These losses did not deter the Vihiga farmers, who had formed a WhatsApp group, went online to find out what they were doing wrong, and what the solution was.

From the tutorials and videos they found online, they learnt that to take care of the problem they had to heat-treat their soil and also line the floor of the greenhouse with heavy-duty polythene, commonly called dam-liner, and thereafter plant in sacks. From YouTube videos they learned how to prepare the rooting mixture, which was a crucial and labour-intensive step that would no doubt require hiring extra hands on a large outfit. There are other practices like layering and de-budding with the aim being to get just one main stem growing upwards supported by a string hanging from the roof of the house.

When we visit the other member of that revolutionary gang, and who is also a key founder member and Ngoda’s friend, is Robert Kivayiru Mulemi, in Inyali village he shows us the technology they discovered online.

Heat treatment

The strange Frankinstenian contraption outside the greenhouse. Two metal drums are welded to a platform, interlinked by two metal pipes, a spout jutting out of one of them. One rests on a brick hearth that is burnt black, indicating a fire is lit there. Besides the structure are three holes, equally burnt black by fire.

“This is the lab where it all starts,” he explains when he sees the curious looks on our faces. “This is where we treat our soil before it goes into the bags in the greenhouse. It is the most important step because if you don’t get it right you will have so many problems inside there.”

He explains how water inside the first drum, which is sealed air-tight, is boiled by lightning a fire underneath. The resultant steam, having no escape, is forced through the connecting pipe into the second drum, which is filled with the soil mixture that will go into the bags. It is this steam which sterilizes the soil mixture, which will later be cooled before it is packed in the bags.

We ask him how he acquired the technology, which reminds me of the smoky distilleries used by chang’aa-makers in nearby Eregi, and he points at a cellphone. “These days almost everyone has an internet-enabled smart phone. You only need to put in bundles and do a search online. Too bad we waste them doing other things that are not helpful.”

At the far end of the greenhouse the older crop is almost ready for harvesting, the succulent tomatoes on the vines starting to turn orange, arranged in neat rows. He uses discarded cement which he says is good for his tomatoes because cement contains lime, which the soil needs.

Unlike the rest of the crop that looks healthy, there is one row at the edge that doesn’t look in great shape, the fruit turning brownish.

“I made a mistake with that first row,” says Mulemi. “Actually we make mistakes all the time! I didn’t time the layering, the staking and the spraying correctly, and by the time I discovered it was too late to save it.

Now I will have to destroy the entire row. All the same I managed to save the rest of the crop by consulting other farmers and the internet. That is what we do in our little group because we are a community.”

I ask him about the structure itself, what a retiree coming back to the village to do some farming would be looking at in terms of capital.

“The idea is to start small and expand, and it needn’t be very costly because the farmer already has lots of natural material around him to utilize. With a capital of about sixty-thousand, and working in consultancy with those of us who have tried it they are good to go.”

He points at the posts, beams and rafters of his structure, which he says are made of grevillea posts sourced from his farm. That all he needed do was buy the nails and hire a local fundi.

“I was part of that founding group that Ngoda spoke of. I remember we met in his home with the Israelis and were introduced to the Amiran greenhouses. Well, they didn’t last long.”

He tells us he dismantled the expensive steel framework and used it for fencing, opting instead for a sturdier and cheaper framework that he made himself; and which hasn’t disappointed him so far.

“The only other thing the farmer would need to buy is the polythene roof sheeting, which is locally available and sold per foot depending on the number of feet the fundi will need to cover the structure. Then they will need the black dam-liner sheet to cover the floor, again available in hardware stores sold per foot.”

Diversifying high value crops

He points at a coil of drip piping in the corner and tells me that it is the only equipment he had to send for in Nairobi, and which he says can easily be ordered using the various courier services operating on the Nairobi-Kakamega route if the farmer knows where to shop; and which is where veterans like him come in to help to keep them from getting conned.

Mulemi is quite adventurous. He tells us that the previous season he experimented with zucchini, of which he shows us the remainder of the harvested crop that he is clearing to make space for another crop. I am clearly surprised, and ask him where he would get a market for zucchini in Vihiga. I am a local, and I know the staples and commonfare you are likely to find on an average Vihiga household.

He tells me that when he showed a sample to Sosa Cottages, a popular high-end resort in Gisambayi closeby, he was given an order that he could not meet. He wished he had other farmers doing the same so that they could pool and meet the order and thereafter split the profit.

“That is the mistake people make, asking: where is the market?” he says. “What you need to do is first of all have the product, and preferably in good quantities, and thereafter go to the market.”

We talk about maize, and he laughs and tells me that, factoring in the inputs, a smart greenhouse farmer can make up to twenty times what a maize farmer does in the same acreage.

“And we are talking about a steady income throughout the year, unlike maize, which they will harvest maybe once a year or twice a year, for those who plant twice. We have simply run out of land in Vihiga, and we have to use the little there is wisely. With a greenhouse you can even grow crops on the flat roof of those storied buildings they are building in towns!”

We step out to view the rest of the farm now that the skies that were threatening to open up when we were at Ngoda’s have held. The farm is neatly apportioned using rows of grevillae trees and in the portions he grows a variety of vegetables open-range: spinach, kales, spring onions and many others. At the fringe is the maize he was cautioning against, and which is nearing harvest. But he can be permitted to drink a flaggon of wine because his farm is large by village standards. It is an ordered and well-kept farm.