How low farm mechanisation holds back Kenya's agriculture

Sub-Saharan Africa, Kenya included, has the lowest uptake of agricultural mechanisation in the world. [File, Standard]

While agriculture is the economic activity that contributes the most to Kenya’s GDP, a majority of Kenyans have yet to embrace mechanisation. There is also almost zero use of irrigation, with a majority of farmers relying solely on the rains and farming done on less than an acre of land.

As such, the country offers a huge potential market for manufacturers of agricultural machines.

In 2023, agriculture was the country’s dominant sector, representing 21.8 per cent of the total GDP.

The sector employs around 80 per cent of the country’s rural population. It contributes to 60 per cent of the export earnings and employs 75 per cent of the national labour force.

However, only around 10.2 per cent of land in the country is arable.

A majority of these farmers are past their most productive years. According to Kenya Youth Agribusiness Strategy 2017 - 2021, the majority of the farmers engaged in agriculture are aged between 50 and 65 years. This is in a country whose median age is 19.857 years.

According to Kenya’s Agricultural Census of 2019 by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS), out of the total 6,360,303 farming households in the country, a whopping 2,220,814 farm on less than one acre, with only 383 households having more than 500 acres.

Out of the 6.3 million farming households, 4,835,566 practice subsistence farming. These farmers mainly use manual labour on increasingly shrinking parcels of land as the youth migrate to urban areas in search of white-collar jobs.

“Relying on manpower sets back agricultural production by weeks. Mechanisation is much cheaper,” Timothy Njagi, a senior research fellow with Tegemeo Institute, told The Standard in a past interview. “Through mechanisation of agriculture, yields can even increase three times.”

To increase access to mechanisation, a Draft Agricultural Mechanisation Policy was drawn in 2021.

It noted that the country’s current use of motorised power stands at 30 per cent, with hand and animal draught power (ADP) at 50 per cent and 20 per cent respectively.

Kenya’s low level of mechanisation is attributed to inadequate training, research and technology development, weak local manufacturing and distribution, insufficient agricultural mechanisation quality assurance, low level of investments in mechanisation services, poor extension and technology adoption as well as weak institutional and legal framework.

Amid these challenges, the country is in great need of agricultural mechanisation due to the decreasing availability of farm labour, lack of interest by the youth in farming activities, adverse climate change, and HIV and AIDS prevalence, the Draft Policy document noted.

Sub-Saharan Africa has the lowest uptake of agricultural mechanisation in the world and is heavily dependent on manual labour. Several interventions have been made to address this to varying degrees of success.

Half a decade ago, many countries in the continent established public sector-operated machinery hire services to make it easy for smallholder farmers to get hold of these machines for optimal production.

Despite these efforts, farm power availability per area of agricultural land has declined or stagnated in many sub-Saharan African countries over the past decades, leading to increasing reliance on human muscle power, the Draft Agricultural Mechanisation Policy notes.  

The number of tractors in the region declined from 235,000 in 1970 to 222,000 in 2000. Africa and the Middle East have only three per cent of the global market of agricultural machinery by geographical area.

Research shows that Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania had more tractors than India 40 years ago. However, by 2005, India had a hundred times more tractors in use than the three East African countries combined.

In 1965, Kenya established Tractor Hire Service (THS), whose broad objectives were to open new land for wheat production, introduce modern farming practices, stimulate and encourage private ownership of farm tractors and machinery, and train the farming community on the general techniques for good seedbed preparation.

THS and Plant Hire Service (PHS) joined in 1981 to create Agricultural Mechanisation Services (AMS), whose stations are now operated by the county governments, offering services such as dam construction and de-silting, construction of farm access roads and soil conservation structures to farmers.

They are also keen on opening up new land to agriculture through bush clearing, ripping, and levelling.

By 2012, 78 plants and 115 farm tractors were available in 24 AMS stations countrywide. The numbers have increased since.

The country also has an Agricultural Machinery Testing Unit, Agricultural Technology Development Centres, Farm Equipment Use in Small Holder Agriculture Project, and has had many programmes geared towards making it very agriculturally productive.

A 2016 survey showed that the level of agricultural mechanisation varied across enterprises and operations along the value chains. Land preparation had the highest level across most enterprises, led by wheat at over 95 per cent.

Planting operation is only mechanised in a few crops such as maize at 56 per cent and wheat at 95 per cent.

The high labour-intensive weed control had low levels of mechanisation across enterprises (maize at 46 per cent, and tea at 14 per cent), with the highest application of mechanical weed control occurring in wheat at over 95 per cent. Harvesting levels are low in most enterprises except for wheat at 98 per cent and paddy rice at 55 per cent.

Joost Mueller is the business development lead of Kenyan firm Hello Tractor, an Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled agricultural technology company that connects smallholder farmers with farm equipment owners through a digital marketplace.

The uptake, Mr Mueller says, has been good.

“We see smaller farmers going from self-sustained farming to actually being able to sell crops. ,” he says.