Sowing the seeds of success

01 November 2012

It’s not just in schools that Farm Africa is training young Kenyans in the skills they will need to grow food effectively throughout their lives.

We are having just as great an impact with young Kenyans who have left school but who are learning how to transform small plots of land into viable food businesses that will sustain them well into the future.

Our goal is to develop at least one successful business for each youth group that we work with. And we are thrilled to see each group making excellent progress towards getting their agricultural enterprises off the ground.

The three groups learning to grow and market vegetables have each been provided with an acre of land. They are using the extra land to experiment with different seed varieties to see what grows best.

Young Kenyans turn cabbages into businesses

They are also learning effective techniques that will help ensure bigger and healthier harvests, including: seasonal planting, use of fertilisers, and spacing and weeding. Once they have begun to harvest their crops the youth groups can also use the extra land to rotate crops, keeping their soil healthy and fertile.

Just as important as learning the nuts and bolts of successful planting and harvesting, the groups are also learning how to manage and adapt when adversity strikes. The Baraka Youth Group recently set up a nursery to grow new crops to replace their crops destroyed by flash flooding. The Glory Youth Group has taken similar steps, setting up a nursery to grow new peppers after the crop was blighted by plant disease.

Read more about our work with young farmers.

Learn more about our work in Kenya.

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