Second Harvest Season Begins at Ambwere Farm

The second harvesting season at the Friends United Meeting Sustainability Farm (the Ambwere Farm in Kenya ) commenced on 30 September 2025. This week marks the third week since harvesting began.

This season, farm workers planted 800 acres of maize on our 902-acre property, with the remaining acres being occupied by roads, forests, and storage buildings. We managed to get a combine harvester to do our harvesting and, unlike last season where we used four machines, this time around we are only utilizing one machine for our harvest. This allows for easy, proper, and effective monitoring and management as we carry out our harvesting with a key aim of minimizing or reducing wastage and losses.

We planted two varieties of maize: Pannar 691, which was also planted last season; and Pioneer 3812, replacing Pannar 15 from last season. All the seed is grown for commercial purposes. So far we are finished harvesting 160 acres. We have harvested the river bed area first, so the maize there is not spoiled due to excess water and the rains. Currently, we have over 4000 bags of fresh maize which has been harvested and later transported to the dryer and stored at the same premise.  

We are expecting an average of twenty-five to thirty bags per acre on the already harvested areas, and we remain optimistic that we shall have a better harvest than last season.

Apart from our own proceeds, over 200 families within the community have been empowered during this harvesting phase. This is through engaging the local community in hand harvesting on selective blocks of land that the machinery cannot access, and also using their labor to hand pick fallen maize on a daily basis on the already-harvested blocks. Through this service, they earn daily wages which helps them provide for their daily family needs.

Robert Wafula, Assistant Farm Manager

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