Smart Farm: Potato value addition in Limuru

Value addition in the agricultural sector has been hailed as a way to improve earnings while diversifying products to consumers. For Hannah Wanjiru, a potato farmer, this holds true as she has been able to triple her income ever since she decided to open a small plan to make crisps as well as cut potato chips to sell to restaurants.

This is Murengeti in Limuru town. It is where Hannah Wanjiru calls home. But it is also a place where Hannah cultivates the second most important food crop in Kenya after maize: Potatoes.

When I visited Hannah at her farm, it was a beehive of activity. Together with three workers she has employed at her farm, they are busy preparing and packaging crisps made from potatoes. Hannah’s love for potato farming began more than a decade ago when she got the inspiration from her husband, who convinced her to turn their one-acre idle farm into a potato field.

“The reason we do it is because the weather here is favorable for growth of potatoes. Basically, potatoes take three seasons in a year since they take three and a half months,” Hannah explains.

For all that time, Hannah was simply selling her potato produce raw, but she was still yearning for more.

“In our farm, we do rotation so we harvest for about two seasons and we get about ten sacks.”

But in 2011, Hannah took a dramatic shift in her farming, something that changed the shape of her potato-farming venture. And her husband once again played a key role in this. “I have been doing the business with my husband Michael. One day he visited a small crisps processor and he developed an interest in crisp and that is where it all started,” the thirty-five year old mother of one explains.

Since then, there has been no turning back for this ambitious farmer as she began processing crisps.

“When we decided to start crisps processing, we only had twenty thousand shillings, we had our own potatoes and we brought the required items, jikos, sufurias, and we started off.”

Turning the potatoes into crisps requires some hard work though. Immediately they are harvested, the potatoes are first peeled, after which they are thoroughly washed. From here, the peeled potatoes are chopped into thin slices.

When choosing potatoes for crisps, Hannah says, you have got to check type of potato. Not all potatoes do well for crisps. Some will turn red, brown, white and you need the crisps to be slightly golden.

The chopped slices are then deep fried to light golden colour, before being cooled for about thirty minutes. They are now ready for packaging in these translucent polythene bags. Hannah processes about four hundred packets of potato crisps every week. Hannah has definitely found a lifeline in adding value for her produce as she has more than doubled her earnings. On a good month, Hannah can make over fifty thousand shillings from her crisps.

“When we were selling raw potatoes, the cost is from 300 to 500 shillings per bucket…so when we were selling our potatoes while raw, we used to sell at between 350 to 400 shillings…after value addition each packet goes for one thousand five hundred shillings.”

Barclays Bank soon came knocking offering business advice on how expand her venture. The programme in partnership with Technoserve, imparts youth like Hannah with people skills, work skills, and entrepreneurial skills in order to enable them achieve economic independence.

Hannah is now aiming at expanding her farm in a bid to grow it to a mechanized level hence abandons the tedious manual labor