Hoosier Farming Development in Kenya

BELOW IS AN EXERPT FROM A RECENT E-MAIL FROM JOHN CORY
(John is championing the Kenyan Food/Farming Solutions for the Jubilee Village Project)



8/29/2008

"Just finished a phone call with my contact at the IU-Kenya Partnership. They have a very good tail wind right now on some of several food and ag initiatives. Matter of fact, it sounds to me that what I had truly wanted to explore in nutrition and food production, they are really wanting to throttle up right now. They currently have a new initiative with Purdue underway to collaborate on ag and food production efforts.

He says that the IU folks in Eldorett feed 30,000 people per week - FOOD IS A DARN BIG DEAL! Food production and value added processing is exactly where everyone needs to go, and appears there may be some major donors willing to make this happen. The current efforts have been to do what we have been talking about, and that is to get the locals to grow their own foods. During the past few years, the major effort has been what we saw in Swaziland, which is to get families to grow gardens and use veggies to generate radically better nutrition. Corn is also a big staple, but at 7,000 feet elevation, it is not as easy to grow as other things. The thing they have had the most success with recently is passion fruit. Matter of fact, they are just working on completing a grant to finance a juicing operation for these "co-op" farmers that are growing it...another value added process.

IU and Purdue are currently networking the earth to find and recruit an ag specialist that will live in Kenya and be the Kenya Ag Specialists American Counterpart. They want someone who knows ag technology, farming, food processing, ag extension, and has enough intellect to know how to navigate the global and political waters. This individual needs to have experience with enough international business that the normal frustrations of logistics, politics, culutures and limited resources of all kinds are viewed as an opportunity for change and not a foundation for status quo and constant complaints. They want a doer, not a talker.

It is a 40 minute plane ride from Nairobi to Eldorett. They can have somebody give us the tour of their work. They have both indigenous small farm initiatives (much like the little ag extension farms I saw in Swaziland) as well as large commericial farms for mass food production. I would like to see these. There are also dairies and poultry operations there, big and little. But he says...they need so much help...where do we begin!"