Cow Searching/Touring in Kenya

Left to Right: Cow dealer, myself, and Samuel. This is the first farm we visited in Kenya.

       At Ebenezer Dairy Farm (the farm I help with at the bible college), we are working at refining our herd's genetics and down sizing by selling our lower producing cows, keeping our higher producing cows, and buying one high producing cow. Since I was planning on going to Kenya to visit my Aunt and Uncle anyway, I decided to see what the cow market was like in Kenya. This is a part of Kenya I have wanted to visit ever since I've been living in Uganda. Through some connections, I came in contact with Samuel. Samuel, and some of his colleagues work with an organization called Send a Cow. Send a Cow is under UKAID, but has a program that is similar to Heifer International. They work with women's savings groups in the rural areas of Kenya; after working with the savings group for one year, they buy them a pregnant heifer. The saving group which receives a cow is required to give the first heifer calf away. Samuel and his colleagues were touring some farms to identify heifers for Send a Cow to purchase. They invited me to go along with them in their Land Cruiser to look for heifers. All the cows we saw were either Holstein, Ayrshire, or Guernsey or a mix. I was not helping them, only going with them for the ride and to see if any heifers might be suitable for our farm in Uganda.

Here is a pit for storing silage at the first farm we visited. The corn was about to be harvested and put here. They told me that once this pit is full, it can last this farm up to 8 months.

        The Rift Valley is an area in western Kenya. The elevation is 5000-10,000 ft above sea level. Because of the elevation, it is cooler then most parts of Africa, which makes it conducive for producing milk, wheat, horticulture crops, and tea. It was very fascinating to me because I am used to areas of Africa which are warmer, with little or no dairy production. I am not used to being in an area with so much tea either.

The whole day we were in the Rift valley. Pictures can not describe the beauty there. Tea fields, pasture, corn fields, and vegetables.

Here is an average size tea field, probably around 2 acres. While there are big tea plantations in places, most of the tea fields we saw were small-scale tea operations.

          According to http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/100020-the-worlds-top-10-tea-producing-nations, Kenya ranks 3rd in the world for it's tea production.
       

Notice here the diversity: fenced pasture, a Holstein cow, house, tea field behind the cow, corn behind the tea, eucalyptus and pine trees along the fence.

I got to see some rigs I rarely, if ever, in Africa. This combine was going to harvest wheat.

We didn't stay behind this guy too long. :)

The second farm we stopped at had really nice animals, but they didn't have any heifers for sale.

          

  The third farm we stopped at had a lot of animals, over 100 they said. Because there were so many animals, the care was not as good and the cows didn't look as good as the other three farms we visited. However, because this farm had around 20 heifers that were 3-4 months pregnant, the guys from Send a Cow were able to identify and tag 10 animals which they will go back later and buy. Send a Cow only buys pregnant heifers for their program.

The farm that we visited with the most animals.

The crew from Send a Cow and the farmers working with the cows. Samuel, the guy with his hand in the cow, is pregnancy checking each animal, then the guy in on the right in the black hat was putting eartags in each animal Send a Cow is purchasing. The guy in the white hat was writing down the number of each animal. Many of these heifers were 3-4 months pregnant.

The Land Cruiser we were touring the countryside with.

        The fourth and final farm we visited for the day, also had nice cows. There were probably 50-70 cows and heifers at this farm. What I liked about this farm was that the cows in the pasture reminded me so much of what I might see on a  Pennsylvania farm. I had to keep reminding myself that I was on a dairy farm in Africa, and not in Pennsylvania.

Cows under a shade tree, in a pasture, with a stream running through it.

About the only way to tell that we are in Africa is the small tea field on the side of the hill in the background.

         In the evening, I traveled for about two hours to my Aunt and Uncles house in Kisumu, Kenya. It was a fun day for me. I never saw so many Holstein cows, tea fields, and eucalyptus trees in a days time. The weather was amazing: blue sky, breezy, and comfortable temperatures, I never broke out in a sweat the whole day.