Kapu Africa Farm Project

Kapu Africa Farm Project

Earlier this year we became aware of an opportunity to acquire a long-term lease on a large tract of land. The Kenyan government has an initiative called Food Security 2030…essentially focused on eliminating the need for food imports into Kenya by the year 2030. Kenya has massive food production shortfalls, the worst being soybeans. Today, Kenya imports 98% of their soybean demand! They import 30% of their corn demand. So, Food Security 2030 is vitally important to the long-term stability and prosperity of the country. As part of that initiative, the government is releasing huge tracts of land previously held as uninhabited, unfarmed Government Trust Land.

One of those areas is called the Galana Kulalu Project. It is 1.2 million contiguous acres of mostly virgin land in eastern Kenya, but it is an arid region which requires irrigation for successful farming. The government's commitment is to develop the irrigation systems over the next several years. As of today, they have 10,000 acres irrigated with another 10,000 possible from current water sources.

The way the lease process works is that interested parties submit an application to the Kenyan authorities who will in early 2016 evaluate the merits of all the proposals as far as Food Security 2030 is concerned, and will propose leases based on those merits. There are dozens of proposals already submitted, none of which has any assurance yet of being allocated land.

Midwest Food Bank's Kapu Africa, GOYA Ministries sponsored by Eastview Church in Bloomington, Illinois, and our Tender Mercies Kenya partner Soy Afric have joined forces and submitted a proposal to develop a large scale soybean farming operation aimed at reducing Kenya's 98% soybean imports, coupled with an Agri-Business School for both current farmers and aspiring future farmers. We proposed working with Soy Afric to develop more soy-based for human consumption to further fortify the Kenya diet. Our motivation for the proposal is simple…to assure food availability for our distribution needs and beyond.

Since the soybean farming is currently in such infancy in Kenya, our proposal asked for an allocation of 1,000 – 2,000 irrigated acres in 2016 to begin developing crop management strategies as well as securing sources for basics needs such as seed, fertilizers, pesticides / herbicides and storage / hauling.

In September we opened discussion with a custom farming enterprise currently operating a model farm on the 10,000 irrigated acres, and believe it may be possible to at least begin operations though custom farming rather than trying to acquire all the equipment ourselves. A few of us plan to visit the custom farming operation in November to better gauge their interest, and ours, in establishing a custom farming relationship.

Our need

At this point, we ask for your prayers. We need to clearly know God's will for our involvement or not, and we need our proposal to be understood by the Kenyan Government as purely humanitarian and not financially motivated. This is a huge undertaking. We believe if we're careful to follow God's will that it will succeed.