Welcome back to Mega Farm Organics where we aim to learn, unlearn an relearn everything farming. On this blog post we aim to educate each other on some few lesson’s I have learnt in Commercial farming for two now.
Disclaimer to anyone reading this, we focus on vegetable farming i.e. Kale, Spinach, Traditional Vegetables including Managu, Kunde, Sagaa, Terere and Kanzira.

What I know for sure about farming is:

From a previous blog post I mentioned that farming is a capital intensive business. For it to give you returns that will sustain you as farmer, you have to know how to spread risk to ensure you have similar produce for your target market. Take an example of us, we focus on green leafy vegetable farming, before I had an understanding about spreading of risk, I focused solely on Kale farming, doing about a quarter an acre of kale. The biggest challenge with this is that at some point Kale is highly demanded on certain season and not on others. Secondly the clients want to find all produce at one place, hence they opt to go with the more established farmers who have the capacity to produce all sorts of leafy vegetables; a sort of one stop shop for them. Spreading risk will pivot you to take advantage of economies of scale. In a simple term your cost of production reduces due to increased production. I’ll paint a picture for you, where you are able to effectively water a quarter acre of land but the utilization of this land is at 70%, hence you can plant more variety of produce to fill it up by 100% productivity but you are still using the same amount of water to still water the piece of land. Now you have more produce without increase in any inputs.

As a farmer you have to be willing to bear the losses that come with this venture. Losses can be seen in different ways, where you have decided to start farming and sometimes you do it for the sake of the money you hear it will yield ( and definitely you can get the monetary value of it), but there are some unforeseen risk. Imagine having planted a whole acre of Spinach only to be destroyed by hail stones or the morning Fog that affects the Spinach leaves which have black spots and become crunchy/hard. By the time you recover from this it might be a whole month worth of produce that will be affected. A similar thing happened where we tried to produce tomatoes (we are located in Kiambu county to give context). We can grow tomatoes but not during the rainy season. A quarter acre of land of tomatoes was destroyed by the long rains back in 2020.
I have read on twitter threads people who’ve started farming especially potato farming used over Ksh.200,000 only to not even get a quarter of the money back.
You need to psychologically prepare yourself for such eventuality and learn the lesson moving forward.

Farming is very rewarding, there is good money in farming but you need to have invested well enough (capital intensive business). We focus on vegetable farming and a huge cost of farming is water. If your aim is to have an all year round supply of your produce you need to invest in water. Most people that do commercial farming have dug boreholes/wells for their farming, while others use project water (which per unit meter can be cheap). My advice would be to dig your own water as you will eventually eliminate the cost of water from you production cost. You will need to put up an irrigation system that will be easy to manage, you need storage tanks of water to use which can cost up to Ksh.20,000 for a small tank that will be able to water a quarter piece of land, and for this tank you’d need to build a water tower. Initially you will need a lot of capital to invest that will eventually help you enjoy the rewards of your farming experience.

In conclusion I have been a commercial farmer for 2 years now which has given me enough knowledge to share with my audience about a few things I know for sure and if you are a farmer yourself you can engage with me so that we help out people who are looking to join the Vegetable agribusiness sector of the economy.