Written by Evelyn Otieno

Onions can educate children, put food on the table and even provide capital for investment.  43- year-old, Daniel Gakuu Ndungu, dubbed Kieni’s famer number one realized this in the year 2004, when he decided to quit his job as a farm manager and venture into full-time onion farming.

This was after he planted onions on a one acre piece of land and got Ksh. 150,000, which translates to Ksh. 60,000 per month, when divided by two and half months-the duration onions take to mature. “This is many times more than the Ksh. 7200 I used to earn monthly as a farm manager,” he quips. “Since I was young, I have always had an interest in farming. I owned my first piece of land in primary school, where I planted different crops,” he says. Though he was later to perform well at Kinyaiti Secondary school and qualify for accountancy, he still tilled his piece of land. One of the crops he planted is onions.
From one acre, Daniel who has successively increased his farm now cultivates approximately five acres of land. In the January-April season (2011) he planted 4 and half acres of onions which yielded 28,950Kgs. These, he sold for Ksh. 868,500, having spent ksh. 247,500 for planting and management-land lease, land preparation, seeds, planting, weeding and purchase of fertilizers and pesticides.

Daniel, who is married with five children, hails from Kinyaiti sub location in Kieni west district-Nyeri; where he is a professional onion farmer and his wife, Pasqueline Gakuu is the assistant farm manager. For him, farming is full time employment and would not quit for any form of employment. “I have been employed severally in different places and the money and fulfillment I get from farming is unmatched” he says.

He was a school bursar from 1989 to 1992 when he began teaching in Murang’a secondary school. In1995, he returned to being a school bursar, a job he held till 1999. His last employment was from the year 2000 to 2003 as a farm manager.  He managed a 20-acre-farm under onions, tomatoes and French beans.
On the entrepreneurial front, Daniel has been a broker.  Together with a friend, he bought onions, cabbages, tomatoes and French beans from other farmers and sold to markets in Nairobi, Machakos and Mombasa. To solve transportation problems, they bought trucks. However, this was short-lived as they registered a Ksh. 18,000 loss in their first visits to these markets. Consequently, Daniel’s eyes were opened to the fact that he needed to understand the markets better or go into a different line of business. As he was convincing himself that farming was his main calling, he met Farm Concern International, which was already evolving smallholders in Kieni into commercial villages to facilitate market access.


Farming gets better through partnership with Farm concern international

Initially, Daniel and other onion farmers in Kieni cultivated the traditional onion variety, locally known as ‘Bombay’. This produced onions of grade one and two; grade one weighs more, is of good quality and fetches better prices while grade two is inferior, weighs less and gives less returns.
“Farm concern International has since introduced us to hybrid onion variety which grows faster, weighs more, has high seed germination, thrives even with little rainfall and produces first grade of onions and this has increased returns a great deal,” he says. “FCI has been practically sensitizing farmers on the need to use hybrid seeds by comparing the yields of farmers who had planted the inferior Bombay variety to those of hybrid variety”. He adds, further stating the FCI has also introduced onion faming in places like Mbaringo and Kimunyuru where they were not grown before.

FCI has also linked farmers to markets and buyers now come to buy directly from the farms. “During the harvesting season, we now witness over 200 traders come with big trucks and one and half a month down the line, all the produce is sold”, he says. This prevents post harvest losses and frees farmers to prepare land to cultivate beans. Before then, farmers sold onions to brokers who exploited them or took produce on credit and defaulted. “Most brokers would come to the farms and take produce on credit, with the promise that they will pay after they sell. Most of them paid in bits and eventually defaulted. On some occasions, some did not pay, claiming that the produce went bad,” he reiterates.

Daniel commends FCI for introducing them to the commercial village model which has enabled them to pool resources and can now afford hybrid seeds. In the groups, they are also trained on proper farming methods such as harvesting and curing of onions. With good curing methods, they can now preserve onions for longer till prices go up. The season for Kenyan onions is January to May while the Tanzanian season starts from June to January, during which Tanzanian onions flood Kenyan markets. At these times, farmers in kieni plant beans as a form of crop rotation.

Daniel has been able to educate his two children and two adopted ones in secondary school. The staunch Christian attributes his success to God. “10% of my income goes to the church every season and I believe my success has come from God,” he says adding that he is a secretary at Kinyaiti CPK church-Kieni.
Despite his success, Daniel has also encountered challenges in onion farming. He relies on rain fed agriculture and this means losses for him during drought. An example is in 1999 when he cultivated 3 acres of onions at Ksh. 200,000 and due to drought, he only got Ksh 180,000-loss of Ksh. 20,000.  

Most people in Kieni are farmers and as soon as the rains fall, they get busy on their farms, making it difficult to get labourers. Through proceeds from onions, however, Daniel has bought a pickup, which he uses to transport labourers from Muiga, which is 15km from his farm. Though diagnosed with diabetes in the year 2008, he sought knowledge of how to manage the disease from the Diabetic Management Institute of Kenya, which prescribed for him lifestyle change. Apart from eating a balanced diet, Daniel exercises by spraying his crops and doing other physical work in his farm.

Onion diseases such as mildew and purple blotch are common and Daniel has to spray his crops. To reduce disease occurrences, he also has to practice farm hygiene such as good farm preparation, crop rotation, good spacing (3.3-7.7 cm), timely weeding, clearing of debris from previous seasons and clearing border crops-which inhibit free air circulation in the farm.

Surprisingly, none of Daniel’s children aspires to be a farmer, despite his success. They would like to pursue engineering, medicine and other white collar jobs. He proposes that people be sensitized to look at farming as a career and not a last resort for the illiterate and the educated people who fail to get jobs. With sufficient storage, he says that farmers can increase their yield. In April, for example, onions sell at Ksh. 45 per Kg. after farmers had already sold for Ksh 30 per kg.
He concludes by saying that onion farming is labour intensive and any bidding farmer should, therefore, be prepared to work hard.