Dennis Munene is becoming a household name in his Mwea East where he farms tomatoes and watermelons on a large scale.

The 41-year-old has five acres of maturing watermelons. He expects to attain a production of 25,000 to 30,000kg per acre and sell them at between Sh700,000 and Sh900,000 per acre.

A kilo of watermelon fetches between Sh8 and Sh35, depending on the season.

“One should plan well such that the watermelons do not mature at the same time as mangoes. I plant my watermelons in February so that they are ready for harvest in May and again end of August so that I harvest by November,” he says.

Munene explains that mangoes spoil the market for watermelons because consider them alternatives. He also has three acres under tomatoes from which he expects to pocket a huge sum in two months.

His success though has not been easy. Munene has had to invent new ways of watering his farm. has designed a unique water pumping system by reducing the depth between the water source and the pump. He says this now pumps twice the amount of water than from his 50-foot well than it was initially.

This ha enabled him to adequately water his watermelon, tomato and maize crops. At the beginning, the piped water on the 15-acre land was inadequate to sustain a thriving horticultural farming in the dry area and consequently they made only a little profit and sometimes incurred losses.

To solve the problem, Munene saved and bought a 5.5 horsepower water pump and thought his problems were over. Unfortunately, a new challenge arose as the pump would wear its rings out every two weeks due to the effort required to pull water from such a depth.

He would spend Sh. 600 to repair the pump every time and the amount became even higher when he bought a second pump. “By then I had expanded my farming and had horticultural crops in about half of the farm. I had to find a way of reducing the distance from the pump to the well,” he recalls.

Munene immediately embarked on digging a a hole adjacent to the well and placing the pump in it to reduce the gravitational distance. After digging a 15-foot hole, he dug a tunnel connecting it to the well at an inclination of 45 degrees and connected pipes from the well to the pumps through the tunnel.

Once the pipes were installed and the pumps set to work, Munene and his farmhands were pleasantly surprised when the machines pumped twice the amount of water they pumped before, and the rings only wear out after a year!