Turkish farm machines change lives in Kenyan village

By Andrew Wasike

NAIROBI, Kenya (AA) - A Kenyan village is reaping the benefits of farm machinery donated by Turkey.

A modern silage harvester is slicing rows of wet grass to be used as fodder in Lessos village located in the North Rift Valley.

The grass is sucked into the machine and chopped into small pieces and blown out of a chute into the back of a tractor-pulled wagon following close by.

This will later be used to make quality fodder for the community which relies on livestock farming.

Ezekiel Kipseng, a dairy manager of a farmers cooperative, told Anadolu Agency: "We have received the equipment from Turkey which will help our farmers conserve feeds especially during the dry spell, we shall be more privileged especially in terms of volume annually, this will help us overcome milk fluctuations which happen twice in a year.

“The silage machines will help our farmers to conserve feeds because in our region we have maize plantations, we also have the feed mill machine, as a cooperative, we will be able to provide cheap feeds for the farmers, on behalf of Lessos farmers we are very grateful for what we received as it will change livelihoods of our farmers throughout the county."

The Turkish International Cooperation and Development Agency (TIKA) project which aims to end hunger by helping communities to achieve food security, the locals in Lessos received a donation of farm equipment worth $86,000.

Among the items, the community received to boost animal feed production are feed grinders and mixers, silage choppers, a forage harvester, a silage trailer and a silage packing machine among other equipment.

TIKA's Nairobi coordinator Emre Yuksek said: “We have supported the farmers with animal feed production and the best practices to use nutritious silage methodology, we have donated the machinery to support the farmers to enable them to access cheaper animal feed."

TIKA noted that fodder production is increasingly being adopted as a way of building the resilience of livestock-dominated pastoral and agropastoral livelihoods in the dry-lands of Kenya.