Top farmers in Kenya: Daniel Rotich has well and truly milked the potential of his two-and-a-quarter acre land, which is no mean feat in Rift Valley where farmers derive their pride from land size rather than production output.
While on a tour of Netherlands with leading Uasin Gishu farmers last August, one of them disdainfully asked how much land Rotich owned. When Mr Rotich said 2.25 acres, the large scale farmer ignored him for the rest of the seven-day trip.
Eventually, the other farmer came to learn about Mr Rotich’s daily production: 250 litres of milk; 100 kg of mushrooms; compost fertiliser; 70 pallets of strawberries; 200 quail eggs; biogas and 11 crates of tomatoes — all from that small piece of land.
We found the humbled large scale farmer on his third day of observing and taking notes on the farming processes at Mr Rotich’s Del’s Farm Limited whose total daily earnings exceed Sh100,000.
On the 2.25 acres, the bespectacled farmer has a dairy farming unit of 28 cows. The zero-grazing shed walls are constructed out of timber. Iron sheets cover the roof and the floor is concrete.
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The slanted floor allows free flow of dung from each shed into small gutters which drain into a bigger one in the middle of the shed. The cow waste then drains into a huge reservoir of a biogas cell.
The gas is then transported via pipes to the house for cooking and other household needs. Mr Rotich processes his animal’s fodder with an electric-powered mill installed in an adjacent room and buys hay cheaply from maize and wheat fields nearby. The dairy project earns him Sh10,000 daily with his milk going at Sh40 a litre.
The tomato unit consists of two greenhouses, each measuring 30 by 100 feet. The dense plant population inside was another surprise: rather than the conventional 1,500, Mr. Rotich’s greenhouse housed 3,000 plants.
How did he do this?
Mr Rotich’s research had led him to practising “plant sexing”, where a week after transplanting, only two branches are left to grow for every seedling.
The rest of the budding branches are nipped off. This means that there are two plants in one. As for fertiliser, the farmer exclusively uses the compost manure from his biogas residue as well as mushroom tube dumps.
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