Constance Akiso has for the last three weeks
been a creature of habit. Every morning she
harvests vegetables for sale in the
afternoon. This is her first harvest since she
quit her job in January.
When Seeds of Gold caught up with her
early in the week, she had just delivered
her latest order of capsicum and tomatoes
at an upmarket mall in Nairobi.
Now in her 30s, Akiso resigned as a
marketing officer with an insurance firm to
concentrate on farming.
“I actually left employment on January 2 to
do farming,” she says. She previously worked
in sales and marketing at different
institutions, but none of these gave her the
satisfaction she desired.
Some of her friends and former colleagues,
she says, are baffled by her decision to quit
employment, but she is not worried. In any
case, farming is what she had always
wanted to do.
“My friends are actually surprised. They ask
why I am wasting my papers (undergraduate
and graduate qualifications). But I tell
them the knowledge and skills I gained in
school are what I’m applying in farming,”
she says.
While still in employment, Ms Akiso spent
part of her free time researching on farming.
“It took me a while looking through
information, reading stories of other farmers
and companies that are into this kind of
business,” she recalls. After a year of
research, she finally zeroed in on vegetable
farming.
“I wanted to do anything vegetables so I
thought I could start with tomatoes and
greens; then I can always rotate with
something else like chillies,” she says.
Capsicum and tomatoes seem to have
favoured her, going by the rich harvest she
has had this month.
Akiso first leased land in November last year
and put up two greenhouses.
“It is funny. The person who installed the
greenhouses for me happens to be someone
I had read about in the articles on farming.
I called them up and bought it from them,”
she tells Seeds of Gold.
Slow, but steady
Her total investment on the farm is
Sh600,000. Her capital was from savings and
a bank loan. The land in Rongai is a quarter
of an acre, and she plans to buy it.
The intensity of the work needed during
harvesting and marketing partly contributed
to her decision to resign. She says she
needed to prepare the market before the
crop was ready for harvesting.
“I started looking for business even before
the crops matured. she says.
Akiso makes Sh50,000 weekly from her small
farm, which she runs as a business entity
registered as Conbel Fresh Produce. Her
hope is to grow it bigger.
Every week she harvests 500kg of tomatoes
and 200kg capsicum.
“In everything one does, they should put
trust in God because this is what I do.”
But success has not come easy. Asiko has
had to overcome a number of
challenges. The first hurdle is water.
Without a borehole, she depends on the
intermittent Nairobi Water supplies to keep
her plants green.
Akiso also hires a pick-up to transport her
produce to the market.
“I don’t have a vehicle to transport the
produce, so I hire. This means I have to get
my calculations right so that I don’t incur
losses,” she says.
Akiso is happy that her dive into farming is
so far rewarding. To those eyeing the same,
she says: “To be able to do farming
successfully, one needs to do it full-time
because it demands undivided attention.”
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