Nakuru farmers in a joint venture between the county government and the National Agricultural and Rural Inclusive Growth Project (NARIGP) signed a deal with various financial institutions and cooperative societies to facilitate the smallholder poultry farmers.
The partnership will see 2,850 farmers receive training and affordable financing within the developed unit with an aim of accessing affordable agricultural inputs, improved high yielding and disease tolerant chicken breeds.
According to Nakuru County’s monitoring and evaluation, over 90 million shillings has been pumped into the procurement of animal feed formulation machinery, incubators and standby generators to help boost profitability in poultry production
The Directorate of Agriculture in Nakuru County urged poultry farmers to take advantage of the training, as the programme entails an agribusiness component that targets women and youth in order to embrace agriculture as a way of employment
Poultry keeping is one of the most important pillars of the devolved unit’s economy mainly practiced by smallholder farmers, with majority of farmers pulling back from meaningful farming due to lack of proper training and enough capital.
“The beneficiaries are being trained on basic disease control and management mechanisms and best practices in poultry farming. The poultry sub-sector has the potential to transform Kenya’s economy and improve the well-being of Kenyans. Agriculture contributes 26 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) directly and 27 percent indirectly in Kenya, 30 percent of this comes from the poultry sub-sector. This is a big contribution to Kenya’s GDP,” said Njuthe Maina.
Nakuru has approximately 1.5 million indigenous chickens, 18,300 improved Kienyeji breeds, 212,200 layers, 275,900 broilers, 44,000 turkeys, 73,000 ducks and 14,500 geese, according to Statistics from the County’s Department of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries.
