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NEWS & CURRENT AFFAIRS

The Nairobian

Teacher plants pension cash in coffee farming

Smart Harvest

By Christopher Kipsang | Feb 04, 2022

**Retired Agriculture teacher finding joy in Coffee farming**

When Joseph Barsulai hung his teaching boots at St Patrick’s High School in 2015, he tried several ideas before he settled on farming. Six years down the line, Barsulai owns a half an acre coffee farm in Keiyo South. At first, he ventured into maize farming but made losses. After some research, he settled on coffee farming. He bought 400 coffee seedlings each at Sh12, which was well below the prevailing market price of Sh40 and Sh50. His first harvest was however not so impressive and drove him to a point of quitting.

“One of my friends had tipped me the harvest will be huge. However, I was shocked when I missed the target,” he says. He adds that during his first planting, harvesting by picking cherries was difficult.

“This was my first time harvesting the cherries in my life, imagine picking the entire 400 coffee trees using one hand, then pulping using the same hand.”

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He says manual pulping and prolonged drying of the cherries lowered the quality and price. After that rocky start, Barsulai now has over 900 Batian and Ruiru 11 coffee trees in his farm. Batian variety is a tall coffee tree going up to six meters and produces more coffee cherries while Ruiru 11, produces large coffee cherries ideal for export. He chose to incorporate the two plants because the Batian coffee variety, though high yield and sweet, fails to produce coffee cherries in some seasons. However, the Ruiru 11 variety has been a saviour as it is resistant to coffee diseases.

“Batian is a funny coffee variety, it yields in large numbers, but it reaches a season where it goes for a holiday, and to sustain the production, Ruiru takes over,” Barsulai says.

The soils of Keiyo South according to Barsulai have a deep, loam and well-drained feel, an ideal for producing grade AA, AB coffee. In the 2020 harvesting season, the father of four got lucky after his dried cherries were rated the best, attaining the top grade in the grading category at CMS coffee buying company in Eldoret. From 500 kg he harvested that season, the company bought a kilogramme at Sh440, earning a total of Sh220,000.

“This was my best year in coffee farming. For the years I worked for the Government, I never saw such an amount of money in my bank account,” recalls Barsulai.

From the proceeds, he bought a pulping machine worth Sh40,000 and built a house. In the subsequent year, the harvest grew to 600kg, and he built a 60,000-litre underground water tank for domestic and irrigation purposes.

“Farming is rewarding. Being retired does not mean I am tired, life has just begun,” the jovial 68-year-old notes.

He has employed over 10 people to pick cherries every season, earning Sh300 per day. Barsulai uses organic farming to maintain his coffee bushes. He says organic fertilisers act as a cooling agent on the soil, hence it retains a lot of moisture and water. The dark colour of the manure also retains soil temperatures for some time, boosting the growth and ripening of coffee cherries.

“Organic manure is the best for coffee when applied correctly and at the right time. It minimises chances of diseases,” notes Barsulai.

After the harvesting season is over in January, pruning starts, where disease-infected leaves and branches are removed and destroyed completely. This is followed by top dressing with organic manure that is done in February before the onset of rainfall. In May, he controls diseases by spraying the entire farm with Cabrio fungicide, which helps fight coffee berry disease. He sprays the bush with Biofol-high K max, ideal for cherries formation and adds sweetness to the coffee and also helps in uniform coffee ripening. Being the pioneer of coffee farming at Turesia village, he is rallying others to adopt coffee farming. He founded Turessia Coffee farmer’s cooperative society in 2018, registering 150 farmers who had started planting coffee on a small scale.