Pyrethrum farmers at crossroads

East Africa Breweries is looking for more farmers to engage in barley production in order to meet its increasing demand for the raw material.

Mr Evans Gacheru, agriculture manager at East Africa Malting said the company’s capacity is about 60 metric tonnes of barley but production has been fluctuating.

He said growers are now being taken for field tripsto learn best agricultural practices that will enable them to increase harvests.

The manager said three new seed varieties of barley that were introduced last year were doing well.

One was locally produced while Syngenta came up with the rest.

He identified them as Cocktail, Quench and HKBL-5 or Fanaka.

He said output in high producing areas had declined after a number of farmers turned to wheat.

“We want to make it a bigger agenda and are targeting over 500 farmers from Nakuru and Narok who normally produce about 60 per cent of the barley while six farmers in Timau in Meru County produce 20 per cent.

We want them to learn from each other the best practices,” said Mr Gacheru.

He said they were working closely with the University of Eldoret in seed variety production in order to meet demand from farmers by giving them new seed types after every two years.

NO SUCCESS SO FAR WITH SEED

Mr Gacheru admitted that their attempts to have the company produce new seed varieties on annual basis had not succeeded.

Speaking at Timau when more than 35 farmers visited Oldonyo farm which is known for barley growing for an exchange programme on best practices, Mr Gacheru noted that they will continue to engage more farmers in a bid to increase productivity.

“We want to make this farming competitive as well as a business that gives farmers higher yields.

We aim to achieve that through networking and by focusing on research with relevant institutions,” said Mr Gacheru.

He said the region has high potential but the yields are not promising so far, noting that they are encouraging farmers to engage in crop rotation for disease control.