The secret recipe for this income boost consists of various ingredients. It starts with the farmers replacing their traditional Shangi variety by Markies, Kenya’s number one potato variety for chips and crisps. Next is applying best potato practices: doing all the right things exactly at the right time. Naturally part of this is also using the prescribed crop nutrition from Yara and crop protection means from Bayer. As a result, their yield per acre boosted from around 800 kgs with Shangi to some 11,000 kgs with Markies. In addition to these incredible higher yields, the Markies potatoes were also much larger than the Shangi potatoes. This matters, because many off-takers favor larger sized potatoes.

Next to this increase in yield and bigger sizes, sales prices also skyrocketed. Whereas Shangi was sold for KES 6 per kg, contracts have been signed with off-takers for KES 40 per kg for Markies. Finally there are different types of buyers, wanting different sizes. In contrary to the past, now there are no post-harvest losses.

The combination of a boost in yield and a skyrocketing sales price is the recipe how in Nyandarua a potato income per acre explodes from KES 4,800 with Shangi to KES 440,000 with Markies. We encourage you to read the article and enjoy many more - beautifully described – details. This is a lovely case description of what we mean by “PSA is de-risking potato farming”!

Nyandarua potato farmers happy with contract promises: article 1 & article 2