By Elin L Duby | Director
Our Permaculture and Regenerative Enterprise Programme works with small holder farmers and pastoralist women, creating truly sustainable livelihoods through permaculture. In Rongo, the coffee farmers we work with have made great progress as the small processing site we have set up has enabled them to process and market their coffee and the training on organic coffee production and permaculture has improved their yields. As yields improve and processing and transport of coffee is improved the farmers are seeing a great economic benefit and in our partnership we are seeing how we can improve their income further through diversifying income streams.
Read on below about two of the Rongo Permaculture Coffee Farmers and how their lives have changed. With your help we can continue supporting our partners and the work with small holder farmers and women's groups to see greater change in Kenya's communities.
Mary is a widow whose husband died three years ago. He left her with six school going children. Mary's main income activity is farming. She has been growing coffee that has been giving her about 7,000/- per harvest which translated to an average of 14,000/- annually. This has been very little to sustain her family. Paying school fees to the children and feeding them became a major challenge to her. The children used to be sent away from school for school fees. She lacked income to purchase the other basic needs too such clothing.
SVR through partnership with PRI Kenya, identified Mary and recruited her as one of the the Rongo Coffee Project beneficiaries. Since then, she has undertaken three trainings in Permaculture & Food Forest, coffee Good Agronomic Practices (GAP) & Marketing and Agribusiness. She has also been undergoing coffee production extension from the project. This enabled her to increase her production and last year she sold coffee worth 25,000/- and managed to buy a big cow that gave birth and she now milks the cow. She gets an average of seven litres of milk on daily basis. She sells six litres locally and keeps one litre for her family consumption. She sells a litre at 60/- and this translates to 10,800/- per month. This increased her annual income from farming from 14,000/- to about 57,400/- from her farming activities.
Melkio is a widower born in 1924 and he is currently 91 Years old. He has been growing coffee since 1974. Currently he has a total of 1,650 coffee plants. He has been harvesting and selling through a SACCO called Misadhi Cooperative in Rongo but apparently he had been getting very little return from this even not enough to sustain his family. On average, he used to get about 10,000/- per harvest, this translated into about 20,000/- yearly. Harvesting is normally done twice annually. He married two wives who are now dead. He had seven sons of whom four passed on together with their wives and left him with five orphans. He was not able to pay school fees for the orphans as he used to struggle and sacrificing a lot to the extent of surviving with one meal in a day, just to raise money for school fees.
Melkio has received a number of trainings and coffee extension work through SVR and PRI Kenya partnership. Through this, he has been trained on Coffee Good Agronomic Practices (GAP). This has really helped him in taking good care of his 1,650 coffee plantations. He is currently practicing technics such as mulching during dry weathers, pruning of excess coffee brunches to enhance production which he never did before, composting for his coffee. This has greatly increased his production to more than triple. This year, he managed to harvest a total of 30 sacs full of cherries. He got a total return of about 120,000/- (60.000/- per harvest) of which he used to pay for his orphaned grandson university fees at Kisii University. Besides, he has other 4 orphans he is taking care of in high school. He also got Agribusiness training and this has really enhanced his skills as he now minimises his expenditures for higher profits. Melkio says, ‘’ I am setting a side another one acre after I shall harvested the maize specifically for coffee and I am happy for the training I am getting from PRI.’’
Thank you for supporting our work! We believe many small streams will create a big river of change, your contribution is part of making that river flow.
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