First Class Graduate turns Sh150,000 into 16 million business

Today i will share with you a success story i pulled from then Daily Nation. Its shows how a graduate student made it big when he decided to venture into farming despite many challenges.

milk cans

-When Eric Mumo graduated from university with a
First Class honours degree in 2009, he got several
exciting job offers, but he declined them all.

-Fresh from Jomo Kenyatta University of Science
and Technology, the statistics graduate opted for
commercial farming and set up his base in the most
unlikely of places — his arid village of Nzangathi in
Kitui County.

-He started with Sh150,000 of personal savings that
has now grown into a thriving farm worth Sh16
million in assets and 12 full time employees.

In just five years, Mr Mumo has built up a steady
enterprise which includes dairy, fish, poultry and
horticultural units on his 15-acre land and won
several innovation awards. At first, his peers and
some family members feared that he was gambling
with his future instead of seeking formal
employment. They felt, and genuinely so, that his
good academic papers and young age should not be
channelled into risky and unpredictable ventures like
farming but rather into the flashy corporate world.

However, determined to pursue his ambition, and
armed with passion for his dreams and a little
capital, Mumo bought a Friesian dairy cow.

“I bought the first dairy cow in 2009, and soon
after I added two more. I started supplying fresh
milk to local restaurants” he says.

Each cow was producing on average 14 litres daily, which he sold
at Sh60 per litre at the nearby shops, earning
Sh2,520 daily. With the steady income of Sh75,000
per month, Mr Mumo invested the profits in more
cows. Today he has 28 cows. The breakthrough
came when he decided to diversify into tomatoes
and water melons.

“My decision to stop relying on rain-fed agriculture
and to engage in drip irrigation was the turning
point as this ensured I was in business throughout
the year.” The 29-year-old went full blast when he
sunk a borehole, which enabled him to put his father’s
entire 15-acre farm on drip irrigation.

“In the first season, I harvested hundreds of
tonnes of water melon, which I sold in Nairobi,
recovering the costs of my investment and bought
an Isuzu pick-up truck,” he recalls. With a kilo of
water melon then going for Sh32, each trip to
Nairobi was fetching on average Sh48,000, and he
could make several in one week.

When the Saturday Nation sought Mumo for this interview, we
found a delegation of 80 farmers from the Embu
Anglican Church Diocese learning from his simple, but
effective farming techniques. The farmer has been
recognised by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO),
the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Ministry
of Agriculture for his outstanding innovations in food
security.

Last year, he was listed among the most
innovative and promising young farmers in the
country, besides being pre-qualified as a dependable
supplier of fish fingerlings in the region. Mumo
stands out because of his ability to integrate all the
farming units, where they inter-depend on each
other to reduce production costs. Having recently
diversified into commercial poultry and fish farming,
all the units now depend on each other and nothing
goes to waste.

“We’ve established a poultry incubator which gives
us 528 chicks every three weeks and 10 fish ponds
each with a capacity to hold more than 3,000 fish
but the demand for both is overwhelming,” he said.

He explains that all the four units — dairy,
horticulture, poultry and fish — support each other.
“Poultry manure goes to fish ponds to support the
algae fed on by fish, the enriched pond water is
channelled into the horticulture farm together with
recycled dairy manure while the waste vegetables
are fed to the chickens in a fascinating cycle
which saves production costs.

” The farmer says Ukambani region can easily sustain itself if only
enough water was made available to every home. Every week, he is kept on
his toes by overwhelming orders to supply all sorts
of produce including day- old chicks, tomatoes, fish,
milk to the market. In a good month, proceeds from
milk, poultry, fish, fruits and vegetables can fetch
him Sh500,000 gross.

He makes more when he sells
in bulk. Mumo urges the youth to dirty their hands
to make money. His farm has created 12 direct
jobs, and many others indirectly.

Mumo intends to turn his farm into a demonstration centre where
farmers across the region can visit and learn from
the simple ideas and replicate them in their homes.

IT HAS NOT BEEN EASY
Since Eric Mumo ventured into commercial farming,
he has learned on the job the hard way and
overcame odds. From seeking credit to finance his
projects, to marketing his farm produce and
managing workers, he faced challenges he never
expected. Getting a bank loan to invest in farming
was his worst nightmare because the interest rates
are high and there is no grace period.

“Banks are asking us to start repaying their loans in
the first month, and yet there is no crop that can
yield results in such short time.” This frustrates
many farmers. Mumo urges the government to
establish a branch of the Agricultural Finance
Corporation (AFC) in every county to support
farmers. The other challenge has been lack of
skilled labour, which has forced him to invest heavily
in training his workers.

“Most people who seek jobs in farms are semi-
illiterate. Such workers cannot manage a poultry
house, or monitor the health of fish or dairy cows,”
he explains, adding he incurred huge losses until he
started training his workers. The farmer explains
that agriculture extension services are not
sufficient.

“Kenya can sustain a double digit economic growth
if agriculture is made a compulsory subject up to
Form Four to make the youth stop their obsession
with white collar jobs.” Mumo has also learnt to
invest in marketing and quality of his produce.

“I’m very keen on the quality of my products
because I target mostly Nairobi and export market
where consumers demand the best,” he says.

Source: Daily Nation

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