Sacco grows roots of success from nut seeds

Nafaka Cooperative Society in Taveta started from a humble beginning. It was a simple contractual deal with Egerton University to have farmers in the region grow Ggoundnuts and sell it back to the institution. However, this has given birth to a fully-fledged seed merchant, registered by the Kenya Plant Inspectorate Service (Kephis).

The cooperative was contracted by Egerton University a couple of years back to produce seed on their behalf, but farmers have been producing more than what the institution requires. The growers decided to set up a seed business in order to make extra income from the surplus.

“What we grow is more than what Egerton University requires, meaning that we have a lot of groundnuts that is left with us. It is out of this surplus that we decided to establish a seed business,” said Peter Muiya, chairperson of the cooperative.

The seed business is meant to address the challenge of seed accessibility and cut reliance on recycled seeds from the farm, which has been blamed for low production of the crop.

The cooperative has over 1,000 members and they are at the moment recruiting 600 farmers to plant more groundnuts because the demand is higher than the current production.

Kenya remains a groundnut deficit country with an import bill of up to Sh1 billion last year alone against a paltry Sh110 million, with most of the produce mainly coming in from Southern Africa nations.

However, through research and education to farmers, Nafaka Cooperative Society in Taveta intends to help bridge this shortage by planting, packaging and selling of groundnut seed to farmers across the country

Those who have planted the crop have attested to good returns, forcing them to abandon other traditional crops such as maize.

“The amount of money I got from groundnuts... I have never earned such an amount from any other crop previously,” said Francis Mwachovu, a farmer who is now doing the second season of the produce.

Mr Mwachovu, who grows three acres of nuts at the moment, said he earns up to Sh170,000 each season from 1,700 kilos that he harvests in three to four months, enabling him to have at least two to three cycles of the crop in a year.

The programme is supported by ICRISAT and International Livestock Research Institute, which have been in the forefront advocating not only for increased income for farmers, but also pushing for proper dietary through nutritious food.

Over the years, ICRISAT and partners, through the Accelerated Value Chain Development (AVCD), have released new improved varieties of sorghum, millets, pigeon pea, and groundnuts that have the potential to increase productivity and nutrition.

However, the adoption of these varieties has been low mainly due to the lack of breeder and foundation seeds, lack of seed systems, and an undeveloped value chain, a thing that Nafaka Cooperative is trying to address.

In addition to developing the whole value chain from seeds to consumption, the programme seeks to improve household nutrition by diversifying diets, increasing household incomes from marketable surplus and mitigating the effects of climate change by ensuring that farming households have access to nutritious food even in bad seasons.

AVCD is working to promote these crops which are drought-tolerant and provide assured harvest even when the rainy season is too short for other crops to reach maturity.

The programme mainly focuses in regions that do not receive enough rain and it is currently running in Elgeyo Marakwet and Taita Taveta counties, which are classified as a semi-arid areas.

Farmers here are growing a new groundnut variety imported from Zambia, which are high yielding, with growers harvesting up to 3,000 kilos per hectare, up four times from the 700 tonnes farmers get from the traditional recycled seed.

To mitigate cases of aflatoxin contamination that have curtailed Kenyan nut exports, farmers have established aggregation centres where they store their produce.

Manufacturers such as Equatorial Nuts import all of their groundnuts for making peanut butter as nearly all of the produce grown in Kenya are contaminated with aflatoxin.