Office worker turns half-acre city home into profitable farm

Pauline Mwangi shows of part of her farm during the interview. Photo/SANDRA CHAO  Nation Media Group

By Sandra Chao

In Summary

• Pauline Mwangi grows tomatoes, strawberries, cabbages, kales, pepper, capsicum, spinach, cucumbers, bananas and some maize for sale to her neighbours, other customers as well as the nearby hotels.
• She also keep quails and kienyeji (indigenous) chicken.
• Her advice to working women who want to try their hand in urban farming is to look for more than one alternative, especially in buying greenhouses in order to get a more genuine company.

At first glance it is easy for anyone to confuse her with a simple market lady.

It is Saturday morning and Pauline Mwangi is completely dressed down from her usual formal attire during the week and ready to work on her half-acre farm located at Kasarani in Nairobi.

First she checks on the quails, her most recent venture on the farm, to see if they have enough food and changes their drinking water.

Her next stop is the kienyeji (indigenous) chicken, which she rears in a nearby poultry house after ensuring that they are in perfect health, she goes on to walk around the rest of her farm. She has 100 chicken at the moment.

One can be excused to assume that she is in her rural county and not her home in Nairobi.

Ms Mwangi represents a new breed of city women, those who can have an eight-to-five job and still manage to indulge in their farming passion.

“When my children were born, I wanted them to have a healthy lifestyle. At that time there were all these fears about the origin of most of the food that it was being grown around sewers in Nairobi so I planted some bananas outside my house,” she said.

Growing interest

Before long she began planting just enough kales, coriander and parsley for her family to consume in a bid to reduce the trips she would make to the market in Githurai and some tokens for those who called at her home.

“Whenever my friends and family would come visit they would always want to buy some fresh vegetables for their homes and that was when I decided to scale up my farming into agribusiness,” she said.

Today, she grows tomatoes, strawberries, cabbages, kales, pepper, capsicum, spinach, cucumbers, bananas and some maize for sale to her neighbours, other customers as well as the nearby hotels.

Up scaling her passion was not an easy affair, her husband had to finance part of the capital intensive investments which she supplemented with her savings.

She would deliver three crates of tomatoes to the hotels thrice a week at between Sh1,000 and Sh1,500 per crate while she sold a kilo of capsicum for between Sh120 and Sh150 depending on the market price.

The urban farmer has 600 quails which she purchased mid last year because of the growing interest many people expressed in the bird’s meat. She has even bought an incubator so that she can hatch the quail eggs and continue with a fresh lot even as she sold the older ones.

“Right now my farm is all inclusive,” she said. “Previously I would have to hire a lorry and go all the way to Maasailand to look for manure but now I just use the droppings from the poultry houses.”