Another Half Day of Driving

Our tour provider in Africa was African Horizons and they were fantastic!  From picking us up at the airport to answering myriad questions to transporting us safely for 4000 kilometres to providing excellent accomodations, they were outstanding.  We highly recommend them if you are considering a safari adventure.

Agriculture is the #1 economic activity in Kenya.  (Tourism is second.)  Less than 20% of the land is arable and only 12% is found in areas where there is enough water to actually grow crops.   80% of the population is employed in agriculture and food processing.  Typically small scale producers, cultivating about 2 hectares and using hand tools, produce about 75% of the food.

We drove through the "White Highlands", northwest of Nairobi, where there are some European corporate farms and plantations.  You could tell by the fences, larger areas and increased machinery exactly where those farms were.  Tea and coffee are the main export crops produced followed by horticulture products like green beans,  cabbage, avocadoes, onions, snow peas, mangoes and flowers.

Fields of wheat and barley dominated this part of the region -

and we did see one John Deere tractor pulling an air seeder.  This farm is owned by 3rd generation Dutch farmers.

Further along, we came to Great Rift Valley which basically seperates Kenya in half from north to south.  The Valley starts in Lebanon and cuts a swath through Africa all the way to Mozambique.  It divides into 2 valleys in Africa and we were in the Eastern Rift Valley.  Up to 100 km wide in some places and as narrow as 45 km in others, it extends about 6000 km in length.  It was created when the plates of the earth moved and the sides were ringed by volcanic mountains. There are still about 30 active volcanoes along its length and hotsprings in some areas.  The lakes in this area are shallow and have poor drainage so evaporation often leaves high concentrations of soda in the water and surrounding mud.  This environment produces great food sources for tilapia fish and pink flamingoes.  (More on that tomorrow.)  It was a very picturesque valley with lots of agriculture and we saw several parts of it during our safari.

This gave us a new vision for cooperative farming.  Farmers bring their hay and  dry grass, in the big plastic bags you see, to this location and they push it through the baler which makes the square bales.  They use a small push cart or have donkey pull the cart home with the bales.    The baler could be owned by the community or perhaps by one farmer who then charges the rest for the service of baling.