A Grower Out to Change Kenya’s Growing Habits

The hardworking Stuart was busy checking his wheat, when we visited him. When we joined him, he was ready to take us for a field visit. To start us off, we visited the wheat plantation, then headed to the chick peas, thereafter we visited the sorghum plantation and lastly the green grams.

It was awesome taking a look at all those especially when he decided to cut a stem of sweet forage sorghum and gave us to have a taste of the sugar. For sure, the quality cereals promised a good harvest.

Origin and his Journey to Kenya
Stuart is a farmer’s son, born in New South Wales, in Australia. At the age of 16, he left school and started working full time on the farm when he was 17. He then went for a twelve-month agriculture course study. Thereafter, he started small agriculture business. In 2009, he started his journey after he got a Nuffield scholarship that took him to 12 countries around the world, including Kenya, to study his point of interest; farming of grains in low rainfall black cotton areas. The Nuffield scholarship is an award run by the Nuffield Scholarships Trust in Australia. He got support from Grain Research Development Corporation, which supported his Nuffield Scholarships.

On visiting the countries, he got to learn and identified an area in Eastern side of Nairobi; Athi-Rver. There, he saw potential of black cotton soils in low rainfall, “I identified Athi-River through rainfall, soil type and topographical maps,” he said. People said the land was good for grazing cattle, so Stuart was aiming at unlocking the great potential in that area.

Alongside his wife Anne he settled in Athi-River and started serious business. His decision of settling in Athi-River for farming was motivated by the fact that the Australian industry would be pleased to see a scholar extending the knowledge to Kenyan locals.

Ausquest is born
AusQuest farm was established in the year 2012. It took Stuart and Anne 12 months to develop the land. During this time, he conducted a lot of small trials to come up with most viable crops. In each trial, he ran a field day as he kept learning out of the trials.

Currently, he deals with mung beans, sweet forage sorghum and wheat, commercial size trials of Kabuli and Desi chick peas.The sweet forage sorghum is sometimes made into pallets with the aim of producing commercial dairy feed (cattle).

Production
How do grain growers look at rainfall? According to Stuart, it appears that grain growers look at it through the same eyes as they did 100 years ago. Stuart’s view is that if grain growers want to take a step forward in rain-limited grain growing systems, then they should be looking at more than just millimeters. What he is suggesting is that they start to talk about the total rainfall over a given area and then they confine their planting and fertilization to 20% to 30% of the total area. The balance of inter-row (the area between planted rows), would be essentially only water catchments and would also be devoid to a large extent of crop residues, both standing and loose. The ideal of course, is to maintain 100% residue cover, although in many lower rainfall zones Stuart feels that this is unrealistic with current genetics.

There is great scope with summer crops in combination with current skip row configurations and current best practice, (e.g. zero till/controlled traffic operations,) to direct crop residues onto plant line rows. The residues created by cereal crops, for example, at grain yields of less than 2.5t/ha, struggle to do their job when broadcast over 100% of a field. Stuart says, in moisture limited environments this is a “Catch 22” situation i.e. one needs residues to preserve moisture although there is need for moisture to grow residues. He says, “I realize this is an age old problem and that is why I believe we need to view it differently. Once again, I believe that if we are to move in the right direction, there needs to be a shift from thinking about millimeters per hectare, to looking at the total rainfall on our farms. We need to start to think of rainfall as irrigation farmers do, in terms of mega liters available in total.”

Challenges and some solutions
In everything, there must be setbacks, which, if I may say, keep us going. So, Stuart mentioned some of the challenges he faces as a farmer. As for the mung beans, he mentioned the insect pressure mainly thrips, which reduce the yield by 70-80%. Here he uses critical pest control. In chicks peas, the oxalic and malic reduce amount of insects which can affect the crops negatively. Again, chick peas have a bigger market in India, since it can be used the same way as green grams. Chick peas is said to be better than many other grains since it has less insect pressure. There is need for more consumption of chick peas in Kenya, since the market is too low. As for the wheat, it is sometimes affected by bad weather conditions, hence reducing the yield.

Human and Mechanical Labor
Stuart said that he has excellent employees, who co-operate to bring the best in the company. Though he has few employees because he also uses the machine labour, his workers are Kenyans. This shows that he has created employment to the citizens of Kenya. The company operates in a level-management; whereby everyone is somebody and can share his mind. Stuart said, “Cheap labour is expensive, productivity must be generated from a certain costs.”

Stuart uses Control Traffic Farming, which according to him, is so efficient both in saving time and leading to a good harvest. Additionally, he uses conservation farming which enables him to use the little water maximumly.

Marketing
Most of his farm produce is sold locally and the rest exported. Green grams, chick peas, have high protein nutrition and are good for human consumption, while others like sorghum play a part as dairy cattle feeds. Wheat and barley are bought in advance. Talking about competition, he said,” I came to Kenya to show black soils usage, NOT to be rich.”

Advice to Farmers in Low Rainfall Areas
Stuart says, “Economics are at the core of the decisions we make as grain growers and therefore not in touch on such issues would be remiss.” In terms of mechanization, he says there are few examples to learn from as Kenyans. That, however, was not to say that many Kenyan grain producers are not mechanized, in his opinion, many are.

Machinery cost is emerging as a significant issue in terms of remaining viable, particularly in lower rainfall zones. Stuart gives few points which look at this matter in detail: Wider geographic syndication of machinery, greater use of contractors for specific operations. With the lack of highly full time usage of machines on Kenyan farms there are certain machines that many farmers should not own. In low rainfall environments we must strive to run lean operations. Just as some operations are best done by a contractor so we must use our machinery to maximum advantage. This may mean that we also do contract work for other farmers to fully utilize necessary equipment.

Thinking outside the box in relation to maximizing the capital required to farm a given area will be key in the future to operating in a financially viable way in the lower rainfall zones of Kenya. He believes that, “Profit is the reward for risk and therefore the better we are at managing risk then the more profit we can expose ourselves to.”

Stuart says that there are no simple formulas to assess risk while growing grain in lower rainfall areas although he believes that growers must risk. In low rainfall zones we must have a medium term view. By this, he means we must gear our business to be able to handle back to back loss- making years. While no one likes to take a loss we must understand the volatility that comes with these lower rainfall environments. Conservative gearing and or geographical spread are necessary to successfully survive and prosper while growing grain in these lower rainfall zones. Growers must study historical rainfall patterns and use this information, in order to make calculated judgments in relation to risk.

Giving Back To the Community
Generosity is a key value to Stuart, since he extends his experience as a farmer to the community through farm visits and updates on his blog. Despite the success he gets on his venture, he believes that he can have a positive impact on the community in Kenya. He does this by arranging field visits for farmers who are interested, where the visitors take a look at his farm and he goes on together with his team to demonstrate and experiment in the farm. Stuart through his hardwork has hosted so many people interested in farming, be it university students, individuals, farmers groups and even the President of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy, William Ruto.

After his visit, the president ended up commenting “I would like to urge small land holders not to resist new farming ideas and technology that would maximize their land production capacity.”

One thing that impressed is the fact that even the small-scale farmers admired Stuart too much that they spared their time to attend the AusQuest Farm Agronomy Field Day 2016, and they really wanted to learn new ways of improving their farming techniques. He encouraged farmers to try chick peas on their farms, since he had noted that most farmers lacked knowledge about this crop.

Most farmers appeared to be interested in mung beans (green grams; ndengu), hence they asked many questions concerning them. The field days appeared not to be in vain to many who attended. He says, “Our hope is that as we impart some information to farmers from the region through the open days, what we are doing starts to change people’s idea of what is possible on these soils, during our field days, we have also been able to learn from those attending, which have helped us a lot.”

Stuart adds that his field days are not meant to promote any product or service or even to endorse particular equipment, but to expose visitors to the benefits of black cotton soil. He insists that farmers should start thinking about their farming systems before they worry about the brand of their equipment.

He has established some small plots trial farms for chick peas, barley, regular beans, etc., with the aim of helping the area farmers with what they can plant. Some of the crops which have done well are yellow beans, soya beans and the chick peas.

As noted earlier on, Stuart keeps updating on his blog to help those interested in farming to improve their farming skills. A large number of people have visited this blog to check on crop performance and activities carried out on the farm.

Stuart’s mission is still on. Thumbs up!