Paula Hynes: A Kenyan road trip down memory lane

Some of you may have seen Paula on the 'Hardest Harvest' on RTÉ, where she visited Kenya and lived with a Maasai community for three weeks, but what most of you won’t know is that she returned to Kenya a year later.

A tie stall setup on a kenyan dairy farm

As we head off on a well-earned break and a little adventure, it reminded me of some of the previous adventures we have had together. 

Some of you may have seen the 'Hardest Harvest' on RTÉ, back in 2018, where I visited Kenya and lived with a Maasai community for three weeks. It was filmed in November 2017 and what most of you won’t know is that myself and Pete returned to Kenya in August of 2018. 

I had longed to show him the Hardest Harvest in person, the community I had lived in, the women I had bonded with and the harsh environment I had endured.

We took a flight from Dublin to Addis Ababa and then another flight to Nairobi, the same route I had taken nine months earlier. We linked up in Nairobi with a friend I had made through filming, hired a jeep and Peter Kariuki became our guide and driver for the next eight days. 

Driving four hours south of the Kenyan capital, we arrived in Maparasha. We had taken a brief pitstop in the market where I had sold a cow and calf during filming, and that in itself gave Pete perspective on the 38km journey. I had walked the cow and calf to market. 

The Maasai community had a big celebration to welcome our arrival, the women embraced Pete, and treated me like a long-lost sister returning home.

Our 48 hours with the community were special, and it was a real treat to go bush walking and stumble across herds of Zebra and Antelope. 

The farmers in us were on another mission though so we said our goodbyes, headed North again, and took a brief stop in Nairobi to do a talk on mental health for a group of college students before visiting the largest slum in sub Saharan Africa, a humbling, life changing moment to walk through a slum which is home to 2.5 million people, 66% of whom are HIV positive. 

We hear so much negative about immigrants, we were made so welcome visiting that slum. I often feel that no matter what background you come from, treating someone as an equal, embracing the simple courtesy of saying hello or good morning, goes a long way to friendship.

From Nairobi, we decided to head North towards Embu, rather than hunting wildlife, we were hunting dairy farms. Passing rice fields, coffee plantations and even the state-owned cattle farm, which is home to a native cattle breeding program, we finally arrived at a dairy farm, home to four cows and five young Holstein heifers.

The farm was on a steep incline, cows were milked by hand and fed a diet of elephant grass, rice hay, grain and maize, but only the stalks and leaves of maize, as the cobs were too valuable and were sold on for human food. 

A billboard advertising dairy in Kenya

We stayed the night to share a welcoming meal with the family. Sleeping in remote parts of Kenya, nighttime is so quiet that you really take notice of the wildlife activity. 

The following morning, we departed and one hour down the road, we stumbled across a 16-cow farm, again all Holstein cows, the farm had a bigger emphasis on nutrition and cows were milking well, producing 40L per cow on average. All cows were kept in tie-stall timber cubicles. 

What really impressed me was the speed at which they could hand-milk cows. They informed us that the local town was home to their dairy processor, and of course, we decided to go for a look.

Arriving at the gates of the dairy processor, we were stopped by security guards who weren’t keen to let us enter. A little Irish charm combined with the gift of the gab and a manager was summoned who spent a few minutes juggling the predicament in his mind and finally concluded that it was safer to welcome the Irish contingent into the facility than risk an international potential dairy trade scandal for Kenya. 

Sitting in the boardroom, we were treated to the background of what is Kenya's largest farmer-owned coop, 35,000 suppliers with milk being processed for yoghurt, cheese and butter. They longed to install a milk dryer, but a lack of access to finance was holding them back. To create extra revenue to boost milk price, they were also bottling and selling clean drinking water. 

The coop had also embraced the ability to become a purchasing group and supplied farm inputs to all its suppliers at lower cost.

The coop had ambitions, working towards having milk coolers on every farm, encouraging all their suppliers to record births, inseminations, health issues and create somewhat of a mini herdbook for the processor.

They also encouraged each supplier to undergo agricultural training to upskill. Farmers could spend one day a week in a classroom in the processing facility and also get paid to attend the training. The vision being that better-trained farmers would lead to improved milk quality and increased volumes of milk for the processor.

Grateful for our behind the scenes tour of a Kenyan dairy processor, we said our goodbyes and hit the road and even tually were pointed to a galvanized sheet fence outside a nearby town, it didn't look like much from the outside but after a few minutes the gate rattled and we were welcomed into what is a 200-cow dairy farm on three acres. The farm manager had received a phone call to say we were visiting. 

Mathieu is also a qualified vet, does all his own AI using US genetics, as we showed him photos of our farm, he was in awe, but as the tour progressed, we were in awe of him, an outstanding guy to manage cows. 

Facilities were basic, cows in tie stall shelters, an eight-unit bucket plant, but Mathieu proved that management is what drives performance. All milk was sold directly to Nairobi as fresh milk, achieving 70c/L. Cows were averaging 11,000L per lactation, milk was recorded on every milking and cows were milked three times a day.

The cows' diet was maize silage and grain. All maize was harvested by hand on outside farms and trucked in, fed through pto driven choppers by hand and then the silage pit was levelled by hand; a tractor was hired in to pack the pit.

Mathieu was currently feeding maize from a four-year-old silage pit, 50% of which was below ground. The face of the maize pit was 30ft from base to top, and four men were down at the base bagging silage to be carried to each cow individually.

Cow at a feeding barrier close to Nairobi, Kenya.

Concrete walkways between tie stalls were spotless as the entire yard was washed daily. Performance on the farm was so good that freshly calved heifers were being sold for the equivalent of €4,000 each. Mathieu has such a phenomenal skillset of stockmanship that he could manage cows anywhere in the world, immensely proud of the herd of cows under his charge.

It is always inspirational to see how other countries produce dairy and certainly in Kenya, dairy is trendy, big billboards on the side of main roads advertising it, milk bars in populated areas and milk vending machines in every supermarket. 

It is easy to see how demand for dairy globally will continuously grow as what the Western world considers poorer countries embrace what is the healthiest natural food source in the world.