Solar cooling plants boost dairy industry

Fifty facilities in Kenya’s rural areas enable farming associations to turn profit

KIBUMBU: Four years ago, Njeru Kamuru nearly quit dairy farming. But when he learned that a solar-powered milk-cooling plant was to be built in his Kenyan village, he changed his mind.

Before then, Kamuru said, he struggled to sell more than half of the 12 litres of milk his brace of cows gave during their morning and evening milking sessions.

Selling those six litres earned him about a dollar; the rest of the milk went to his relatives on credit or was drunk by his wife and four children.

Breaking even was hard, he said, with the key problem a lack of refrigerated storage. “I could spend the whole day at the farm waiting to sell milk to my fellow village customers,” Kamuru said in Kibumbu village in central Kenya.

And if the morning’s milk supply was difficult to sell – and it was – he was at least able to pasteurise it to ensure it did not go off. The evening’s milk supply was trickier. “If there were no customers, it all went to waste,” he said.

Others in the Kibumbu Dairy Farmers Association had the same problem, so they approached the governor of Tharaka Nithi County and demanded that he honour a 2012 campaign pledge to construct a milk-cooling plant.

In 2015, the solar-powered facility opened, using county funds.

These days, Kamuru no longer sells milk to the villagers. His family uses two litres a day, while the rest goes to the community-owned plant. “The amount I deliver is recorded every day, and then I am paid at the end of the month,” he said.

Kenyans often struggle with the country’s unreliable electricity supply, with the problem particularly acute in rural areas. For the country’s dairy farmers – who, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), have 3.2 million head of dairy cattle – it’s a particular problem.

Kibumbu’s solar milk-cooling plant ensures that farmers like Kamuru can store their milk safely, day or night, without it going off.

The timing is good: demand for dairy products is rising fast, particularly in rapidly growing urban areas, according to the Kenya Livestock Producers Association (KLPA).

Typically, local governments paid for milk-cooling plants, then handed over ownership to dairy associations, Tharaka Nithi County governor Muthomi Njuki said. It was then the responsibility of the farmers to pay for maintenance, Njuki added. The Tharaka Nithi facility does that by deducting 10% of each farmer’s monthly earnings.

Patrick Kimani, the head of the KLPA, said apart from being community-owned, solar milk-cooling plants were cheap to maintain.

The dairy industry is an important part of Kenya’s economy, worth about 3.5% of GDP, the FAO estimates, with about two million people directly or indirectly working in it.

Kimani said the country had about one million dairy farmers, but just 15% could connect to the national electricity grid to refrigerate their milk. Some of the rest relied on one of 50 solar cooling plants set up in 10 counties since 2014, he said.

With the cost of solar technology falling, he added, building more plants would become increasingly affordable in coming years to help Kenya’s 500-plus dairy associations.

With demand for dairy products climbing, Kimani said, there were plans for plants in key production areas to boost their capacity to process milk into products such as yoghurt and milk powder.

At the office of the Kibumbu Dairy Farmers Association, manager Lucy Muthoni divides her day between monitoring the milk containers that farmers bring in, and checking that the solar system on the plant’s roof is keeping the coolers humming. The plant received more than 5 000 litres of milk a day, she said, with about one-third consumed by people in nearby Chuka town and the rest sent to the capital, Nairobi, for processing.

Solar power and milk made for a good combination, she said. – Reuters/African News Agency (ANA)