Kavita Ndolo is a farmer practicing mixed farming in their family land in Machakos County.
Interestingly, Ndolo appears is a civil engineer by profession, and he worked in the corporate industry for a while before resigning.
He quit his job to fully concentrate on farming.
Here is Ndolo’s story as told by WoK.
Background
Ndolo grew up as a farm kid and he spent most of his time in their farm until when he went to Nairobi for his secondary school and university education.
The farmer stayed in the city after graduating from the University of Nairobi (UpN) after landing a job as a civil engineer.
Initially, Ndolo was doing farming as a side hustle but he realized its potential when it picked up well during the COVID-19 pandemic period.
“A lot of the things I started doing were not being done here before, in the aspect of having a farm life and local connections, it wasn’t too difficult,” he said.
He explained that some of the changes that he tried to implement on the farm was introduction of other crops.
“One of the things that I’ve done since then is trying to get out of crops such as maize and beans because with climate change and everything, the rainy seasons have become shorter,” he said.
Ndolo noted that they mostly grow pawpaws and french beans.
“We’re doing 1,000 pawpaws on our first section and then we have french beans on about three acres. We also have mangoes, oranges and bananas but we do them in a smaller scale,” he said.
He said that he initially wanted to do pig farming but he later went into crop farming to generate more income.
“Pig farming looked like an easier business to start, with time, I figured that now that we’re transitioning from maize, we needed a crop that would give us cashflow weekly. That’s how we started doing pawpaws
“For the french beans was out of a farmers group which we joined and because we had enough water, we decided to try it out,” Ndolo said.
Production
Kithekani Farms has about 50 orange trees which sits on a two-acre farm with each tree producing about 500 fruits.
“An orange tree takes three years to get to maturity and give you good production… also the climate here is really nice,” he said.
They also have pawpaws, french beans and bananas which they sell weekly.
“We harvest 5-6 bunches of bananas every week and we can wither sell them raw or we can ripen them and sell them per piece at the local market,” Ndolo said.
