Kisima Farms prepare for El Nino storms ahead

This morning I headed off to Meru, three hours north of here, for a visit to Kisima Farms, where I met with Buzz Robertson, who heads up the arable side of the 12,000ha operation.

Buzz grew up in Kenya on this very farm and after studying at Harper Adams in England, returned to the farm and has been doing some really interesting work around improving soil health and experimenting with multi-cover cropping.

He operates a four-year rotation between pulses, wheat, canola and barley. Wheat grown on the farm is sold to local millers in Nairobi, barley is sent to near-by breweries and canola is sold via AgVenture – a cooperative – which turns it into rapeseed oil.

He explained that since he has taken over the arable operation they have experienced two years of drought - in one six-month period recording only 60ml of rainfall. However, in the next month, they are expected to be hit by a weather front they are calling El Nino, which is forecast to bring heavy rainstorms.

Kisima sits at 2,400m altitude and is blessed with extremely fertile soils and with the work Buzz and the team have been doing should cope well with the rain to come, but there are wider concerns for other parts of Kenya, where over cultivated, over grazed, compacted soils, are under threat of extreme flooding issues.

It was fascinating hearing from Buzz about the relationship that exists between people, agriculture and wildlife here in Kenya, not dissimilar to Tanzania in that they live in close proximity, but he explained to me that unlike in the UK, where wildlife and farming are sometimes seen as separate sectors, here the two go hand-in-hand. His entire operation lies in the middle of two major conservancies, with a wildlife corridor running through it, which is occupied by everything from lions to elephants and he has to manage his farm accordingly.

We visited a part of the farm where large fences have been erected to try to stop elephants from bursting through gates and wrapping their trunks around fence posts – he told me in an evening elephants can be known to barge their way through eight or nine fences, leaving a huge clear-up job for his team, but that this is simply one of the variables you have to plan for in Kenya.  

Most people in Kenya are connected to farming, either owning land themselves or a close relative in the sector, which means there is a strong relationship to the land. However, Buzz explained that within the younger generation, most of them aren’t interested in farming and view returning to the farm or pursuing it as a career, as a failure. The phrase I’ve been hearing a lot here is ‘our parents worked hard on the farm to give us an education so we could go on to do better things’. 

There is also quite an obvious distinction here In Kenya between large scale farmers who are often white and small-scale farmers who are black. Generally white people are seen as wealthy and successful farmers who are separate to the rest of the farming fraternity, but Buzz and the team are trying to change this narrative by giving back to local communities through investing in education and health programmes, as well as sharing knowledge and skills to improve local farming practices.

Following a survey in the surrounding area, they asked what more Kisima could do to support local communities and it was found that there was a huge demand for knowledge to improve farming practices, so the team have been holding open days and field trials, to share advice and best practices with local farmers.

I was astounded to learn that aforementioned open days attract around 1500 people – a number we could barely fathom here in the UK and demonstrates both a dearth in knowledge about farming but equally a hunger to learn and improve farming efficiency here in Kenya.