The Baraka Farm, part of the Lewa Children’s Home in Eldoret, Kenya, is seeing its “roots” spread beyond Eldoret. The Practical Dairy Training Center at the Baraka Farm , which started just two years ago as an outreach program designed to help other local farmers in the community, is beginning to revolutionize the dairy industry in East Africa.
The project came about as Phyllis Keino, Bread and Water for Africa® spokesperson and founder of the farm, and Jos Creemers, Baraka Farm manager, decided to share their experiences and knowledge gained during the development of the farm, which includes an extensive dairy operation.
As word spread throughout east Africa about the success of the Baraka farm, more than 10,000 people – farmers, livestock officers, students, etc. – visited the farm in the last ten years to learn about the operation first-hand.
But then Phyllis and Jos had a better idea – rather than a guided tour, how about a small course in order to share knowledge about dairy cattle and the best farm management practices in a more informative and practical way?
Students of Baraka Farms’s Practical Dairy Training Center are hard at work.
And with that the Practical Dairy Training Center was born. The five-day, full-time training program provides information on feeding, management of grazing lands, housing, calf-rearing, and milking technique and hygiene.
Already, 60 farm operators, managers and herdsmen have participated in the training. They each then took back to their farming operations the critical skills needed to efficiently and effectively increase safe production of dairy products. In Kenya, there is a shortage of adequately skilled and trained people at all levels in the dairy industry, particularly among small farms – even though they produce 80 percent of all the milk in Kenya. But with your generous support of the Practical Dairy Training Center at Baraka Farm, you are helping to make a difference, for a farm, and for a nation – one farmer at a time
