Four years ago, Njeru Kamuru nearly quit dairy farming. But when he learned that a solar-powered milk-cooling plant was to be built in his Kenyan village, he changed his mind.
Before, he said, he struggled to sell more than half of the 12l of milk his brace of cows gave during their morning and evening milking sessions.
Selling those 6l earned him about a dollar; the rest of the milk went to his relatives on credit or was drunk by his wife and four children.
Breaking even was hard, he said, with the key problem a lack of refrigerated storage.
“I could spend the whole day at the farm waiting to sell milk to my fellow village customers,” said Kamuru from his Kibumbu village in central Kenya.
And if the morning’s milk supply was difficult to sell — and it was — he was at least able to pasteurise it to ensure it did not go off. The evening’s milk supply was trickier.
“If there were no customers, it all went to waste,” he said.
Others in the Kibumbu Dairy Farmers Association had the same problem, so they approached the governor of Tharaka Nithi County and demanded that he honour a 2012 campaign pledge to construct a milk-cooling plant. In 2015, the solar-powered facility opened, using county funds.
These days, Kamuru no longer sells milk to the villagers. His family uses 2l a day, while the rest goes to the community-owned plant.
“The amount I deliver is recorded every day, and then I am paid at the end of the month,” he said.
Kenyans often struggle with an unreliable electricity supply, with the problem particularly acute in rural areas.
For its dairy farmers — who, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), have 3.2 million head of dairy cattle — it is a particular problem. Kibumbu’s solar milk-cooling plant ensures farmers like Kamuru can store their milk safely, day or night, without it going off.
The timing is good: demand for dairy products is rising fast, particularly in rapidly growing urban areas, according to the Kenya Livestock Producers Association (KLPA).
“This means that farmers must have access to storage facilities that work around the … clock ,” said Patrick Kimani, who heads the KLPA. “Solar-powered milk coolers provide such a solution.”
Typically, local governments pay for milk-cooling plants, then hand over ownership to dairy associations, said Tharaka Nithi county governor Muthomi Njuki. It is then the responsibility of the farmers to pay for maintenance, Njuki added.
The Tharaka Nithi facility does that by deducting 10% of each farmer’s monthly earnings.
Kimani said apart from being community-owned, the KLPA’s solar milk-cooling plants are cheap to maintain and can deal with the blackouts that continue to trouble Kenya.
The dairy industry is an important part of Kenya’s economy, accounting for about 3.5% of its GDP, the FAO estimates. It employs about two million people directly or indirectly. It has about one million dairy farmers, but just 15% can connect to the national electricity grid to refrigerate their milk. Some of the rest rely on one of 50 solar cooling plants set up in 10 counties since 2014, Kimani said.
With the cost of solar technology falling, he added, building more plants will become increasingly affordable in coming years to help Kenya’s 500-plus dairy associations.
With demand for dairy products climbing, Kimani said, there are plans for plants in key production areas to boost their capacity to process milk into products such as yoghurt and milk powder.
At the Kibumbu Dairy Farmers Association’s office, manager Lucy Muthoni divides her day between monitoring the milk containers farmers bring in, and checking that the solar system on the plant’s roof is keeping the coolers humming.
The plant receives more than 5,000l of milk a day, with about one-third consumed by people in nearby Chuka town and the rest sent to the capital, Nairobi, for processing. Solar power and milk are a good combination, Muthoni said.
“Milk is most likely to go bad when the day is hot. Yet it is when it is hot that the solar system can absorb and store more energy to keep the coolers operating during the day and at night,” said Muthoni. Since milk can be refrigerated, this means more local people are turning to dairy farming, she added.
At Munene Njoka’s 1.2ha farm in Kanjau village in central Kenya, he is cutting his maize crop even though harvest time is three weeks away. The reason? The five cows in his barn. Njoka chops the maize into pieces, then mixes it with dry Napier grass to make silage, a delicacy he says makes his cows more productive. He learnt the technique at a farmers’ field day and has no concerns about feeding his entire maize crop to his cows as this, he says, brings in more money.
“A single cow used to give me about 8l of milk in a day before I learned about silage,” the father of two said.
“Now I can get as much as 20l from a single cow,” he said. That brings in 100,000 Kenyan shillings ($1,000) a month. It beats growing maize to feed his family, he said, because if the rains failed then the crop would wither, leaving him with a financial loss.
“After investing part of the money back into the farm, buying food, paying school fees and health bills, I still have enough to take my family out during weekends,” said Njoka. That echoes Kamuru’s experience: dairy cows generate more income than growing maize, partly because maize prices are kept low by cheap imports.
“But milk prices are always rising due to demand from a growing urban population,” Njoka said. “This assures me of a steady income all year round.”
