Ranching in Central kenya

Good morning, morning guys. Welcome to Farm Businesses Africa. Yet another beautiful day looking after the Buran cattle. The herd is reducing, has reduced tremendously. Over 40 have left that week and we're about 56 now remaining. We're expecting another flock, another herd of maybe 100 before tomorrow. They are on quarantine currently because they are grazing on that hill you can see on the backdrop behind those trees, beyond that hill. That's where the bigger flock is, the bigger herd is. So we're expecting some later, most likely tomorrow. They come on foot, they just, so if it gets dark before they are here, they just come and they proceed. So this paddock looks a little messy, not like the cleaner that we've had in the course of the week. These ones definitely needs to be, a lot of weeds need to be taken care of. Sorry if my camera is moving too much. So yeah, I was thinking today maybe I get to show other aspects of the ranch, like where the people who take care of this herd live and share a bit of the dynamics of managing such a flock. It's actually a very small herd. It never really gets beyond 120. So and even if it's beyond 120, it's maybe for a week and then goes back to below 100. And why that is, why they prefer to manage it that way and basically just see how the people here live. We say sometimes, we like to say farming is a lifestyle. So we explore a bit of that. I know it has, we normally like to look at the business side of farming, but the social as well because they build each other. So yeah, let's explore that as well. And yeah, some five-star accommodations here. This is a common area where they watch TV. Some nice housing, electricity, solar powered. So that is a solar, some batteries here, some serious power that powers the entire staff quarters. There's one, two, three, there's a 12. We have a common area where they play some board games. TG has been currently removed. Some beautiful accommodation. So then at the bottom side, the cows will come back too. So this is a cattle station. I'm going to show you the livestock handling infrastructure machines there for a minute. So it's a huge space. It's probably over an acre of space and has a capability of handling hundreds of cows. Initially, used to handle nowadays, as you've seen, they've reduced the herd. It's in the lower hundreds. And that is a business model that they are trying to adapt where they no longer keeping a lot of animals. And that is partly because of, actually it's because of the rust loss. So the weighing scale, a little old school, but does the work. So there is a scale that attaches here and you know the deal, how this works. They are handled from below here. Sorry, my camera All right. So local materials. Yep. Yep. So the ranch used to initially, maybe 10 years, 10, 15 years ago, used to hold huge herds of thousands. If you look into their website, they say about 7,000. Nowadays they're in the lower, you know, about a thousand or they're about a margin of 200. And they are trying to make sure that every bull that is ready for market, it's let go. Even the culling of the older cows, it's also done very fast. They are not trying to keep thousands of animals nowadays. And that is again, largely because of cattle rust loss. Because in this area where we are, there are four neighboring ranches and they all used to do cattle. And as time went, they got raided so many times and the cost of hiring as carriers became again, very high. So, and it was just a constant risk. So the decision was made to reduce the herd to kind of de-risk. And two of the, two of the four ranches have actually quit livestock completely. There are no cows there. So just two are remaining. And those two that normally would have about 10, 20, I mean 15, 20,000 cows, now they barely have 2,000, two of those combined because now even the herd is now grazing together. And that is something that is haunting like Kipia, you know, and it's, the rust loss hide under the disguise of, you know, the culture or traditional nonsense about cattle rustling and all that. But it's actually not, it's actually nothing cultural. They are just criminals. They are bandits. Banditry is like terrorism. They terrorize these guys so badly that they've gotten to a point where now this practice is almost, the ranching in Laikipia is almost dying down. The flocks are really, really low. And you know, we are at a point where, Kenya, we have a deficit of beef. We are not producing enough beef. That is one. Where there is demand for beef even outside, these are the kind of facilities that you would expect would raise so much beef for even export. We would be exporting beef right now. And not just beef, small stock, shorts, sheep and goats. And that is another way we would be earning foreign revenues. You know, it's disgusting because it's equivalent to like economic sabotage. These guys, you can't hold a thousand animals because these guys will come and get it overnight. And what I've realized in the few weeks that I've been here, and because it's rarely spoken about, it's a lived reality. And in most instances, these cases don't even get to the media. You only get to hear of the extreme cases where someone, people have, you know, people have died. However, it's a consistent, it's not like it happens once in a while. No, it's a consistent threat. In the last, about a week ago, I was still here, actually. We had, because these guys now have some sort of intelligence to gather that information within the local communities. There was an alarm for about 25 men with guns that were just about to cross the fence. And that night, nobody slept. You go to the villages where they are coming from, everybody knows who's in the banditry. Their fathers are known, their wives are known, their family members, because now we have bandits who are old, who are coming with their grandchildren to rob cattle, you know. And to be honest, it's disgusting. So you look at this ranch, for instance, and, you know, this unit, for instance, that is just doing the validation for, you know, like finishing beef on pasture. It currently, it has about, you know, three people just moving cattle from pasture to pasture with the systems that I've shown you. Three people to move cattle. Then we have about 10 Askaris, because they take shifts, you know, everything. Askaris, and I mean Askaris with guns, just for security purposes, because it is so real. It happens all the time. I'm telling you, not a month goes by without Askaris, you know, and the media will report it once in a while. There are so many documentaries, you know, from Jonathan Namu, Seto Halle, they're there. You can watch them on YouTube. It's become so difficult for this kind of business. And you know, the worrying part is, if you look at South Africa, for instance, you realize that the guys that are doing this genetic improvement, breeding, breeding breeds from scratch, like Dopas and, you know, breeding of Bosmaras and other breeds, Meatmasters or Boas, Red Karaharis, all these great breeds that are coming out of South Africa, they are bred in such ranches. Because ordinary people with small farms are not in a position, do not have the resources to develop genetics from scratch. And I don't mean to multiply what we do in Kenya. That one we do very well. I mean, like building a breed from scratch, because it's a lot of science, takes a lot of years, a lot of resources. Sometimes it could, you know, like build, you know, getting the Dozaton and Blackhead passion and building a Dopa or doing whatever they did and getting a Boa, it was not done overnight. It obviously costs a lot of money. And to be able to do that, you need a business, you know, a huge business, a huge ranch like this, that is able to generate incomes in other ways and carry out that genetic improvement over time. So that, if you look at Africa right now, we are all importing from South Africa. Kenya is in a brilliant position to build breeds that are indigenous to us. Like you look at that example of Dopa and what they call the Blackhead passion, it's a Somali sheep from, Somali sheep is native to this area. We are technically here, we are in Missoula, because the boundary for Laikipia and Missoula is just below this. There's a river crossing downstream. So just behind here, you begin to find that Blackhead passion. It's native to this area, goes up to Northern Kenya, to some parts of Ethiopia and some parts of Somalia. Here it's known as Somali sheep. So we could do things to such a breed that would allow that breed to be more productive. So, but we currently do not have the resources. The people who have the resources are not able to do that because there is not enough security. They do not have the wiggle room to even think of genetic improvement because of what politicians like to mask as cattle hustling. Well, it's just petty theft. This is just criminals taking advantage of the system and calling themselves. And by the way, they get a lot of support from their politicians from Samburu and a bit of Pokot because now Samburu borders the North Rift over there. And they get a lot of support from those guys. It becomes very difficult to solve that because there's a lot of politics involved, but these guys are almost, I can tell you from a flock of about 7,000 now, they barely touch 1,000 nowadays. And that is like 10 years ago. As much as we are happy with some of the things they do, I'm also looking at it and realizing that this is just a drop in the ocean. These guys have a lot of potential. We look at the kind of research they had that they are not now able to implement. They've made a lot of observation in our environments, in our pastures, in our local native grasses that ought to have been tested further and improved. Man, it's so disgusting because now these ranches are now being left to wildlife. Yes, it's okay. It's fine. We can make money out of wildlife through tourism, but that is also just a small piece of the pie. The real deal would have been development in terms of agriculture and development in the lines of livestock production, serious livestock production. So these are guys who've got skills, wealth of knowledge, and they're able to mobilize resources to do what is needed in this field of livestock production, but they are not in a position to do it currently as it is or to do it to the highest level because of the insecurity situations in these areas. I know some of you might have your opinions on whose land was and all that, but that is besides the point. We need to address these things separately. First, we have to stop the banditry. Those are criminals. We have to stop them, then make a forum for such discussions and how the future looks like without using guns. And by the way, sometimes the media also tries to portray this issue as a pasture or a land issue. No, it's not. These are petty criminals. It's not a pasture issue. It's easier to get pastures than to get guns, and these people have guns. So if you were to talk about pastures, it's much, much easier. Bullets are expensive. Guns are expensive. So it's much easier to think of how to grow pastures than how to fight or how to raid farms and how to... Everyone I've talked to here, either it's the Ascari or the herdsmen, people who take care of the cows, everyone knows someone or everyone has lost a colleague over time. Everyone will tell you, a friend of mine, we were camping at a certain point with the livestock, we were raided and we lost him. Everyone has such a story in these ranches. You come, ask all these guys who are here, and because it doesn't take long, it's a matter of every few months you get raided and sometimes you get to lose one person or more. So it's a situation that... It's an ugly picture. It's an ugly situation that I believe Kenya likes, our country likes to hide that part from the rest of the world. That's it for me, and I hope you found this valuable. We get to do more of this. That's it for me for now. Hope to catch you soon on the next one. Thank you for your time. Thank you for stopping by. Bye-bye.