By Talarus Chesang
Baringo coffee farmers now can smile all the way to the bank to earn a whopping Sh.28 million after exporting their first consignment of coffee to Korea.
More than 200 farmers drawn from 27 groups converged at the Katimok Coffee Factory in Baringo North to receive their dues recently.
“Since I started coffee farming in 1965, I have never earned such a huge amount. I sincerely thank the government, factory management and the Korean investor for the noble initiative,” said Frederick Chesyna, a coffee farmer.
He said he brought his coffee all the way from Eldama-Ravine because he fully trusted the factory.
“This is like our own house, let’s build it,” he asserted.
Farmers reap the returns barely nine months after a Korean investor Reverend Cha Bo Yong signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Baringo County Government in June last year.
“I personally chose to establish and invest in this mill here after research was done and proven that coffee specifically from Baringo was natural and sweet,” Bo Yong said.
After the MoU, the investor, in partnership with the respective national and the county governments installed the first ever ultra-modern coffee mill worth Sh.100 million located at Katimok forest near Ossen in Baringo North Sub-county.
The factory, milling up to 1.2 tonnes of coffee beans per hour, began operations on February 4, 2022.
“As you can see, the mill is now yielding handsome returns to the famers,” Plant chairman Michael Yatich said.
Yatich said the first batch of export comprised of 70 percent premium coffee grades AA and AB totaling 650 kilogrammes, which earned the farmers a massive Sh.28million.
“This is a good start. We still have volumes of ready coffee here in our factory awaiting packaging and transportation,” he said, adding that they had to fast track the first payment to motivate the farmers to continue tending their coffee farms.
Currently, the farmers feeding the factory with the raw materials are drawn from Baringo Central, Baringo North, Koibatek and Baringo South.
“We have just received coffee from a quarter of the farmers. We are now expecting the rest 14 cooperative societies to supply us with their coffee from this year, now that they can see the fruits are sweeter at the Katimok mill,” Yatich said.
He was backed by his co-implementation chairman, Baringo Deputy Governor Jacob Chepkwony, who said good coffee pricing has already been negotiated between the government and the Korean investor.
“We can now proudly say that as a county, we have secured a direct market to Korea free of brokers,” Chepkwony said.
He termed coffee farming a game-changer, appealing to more farmers across the county to turn into coffee farming.
Earlier on, before the establishment of the Katimok factory, farmers used to incur a lot of expenses transporting their coffee to Kericho, Eldoret and Kiambu.
