It’s the sweetest harvest from my quarter of an acre

Constance Akiso holds some of her harvested capsicum plants from her green house in Rongai on February 25, 2014. Photo/ JEFF ANGOTE (NAIROBI)  

In Summary

• 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.

By Nation Correspondent
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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.