For many smallholder dairy farmers in Kenya, rising feed costs, expensive cooking fuel and increasingly unpredictable weather are making it harder to earn a reliable income. Across East Africa, farmers are looking for practical ways to produce more while reducing costs and making better use of the resources they already have.
On his dairy farm in Kapsabet, Rev. James Tuwei has found one answer, by ensuring every part of his farm works together.
After serving Kenya for 36 years as a prisons officer and another five years as an Anglican priest, James retired with a plan he had been thinking about for decades. Dairy farming was going to be his next chapter.
Today, Eight cows occupy the clean, well-kept sheds at the heart of James's farm. Three are currently lactating, each producing about 25 litres of milk every day, while the others are young or dry cows that will support the farm's planned expansion.
"My target is ten cows, each giving at least 30 litres a day. That is 300 litres a day. This income—together with my pension—is enough for me and my family to enjoy this retirement."
For James, however, milk is only part of the story.
Walking across the farm, he points to rows of fodder crops growing a short distance from the cowsheds. They are harvested and preserved as silage to feed the herd throughout the year. Nearby, another part of the system quietly does its work.
"Nothing goes to waste here. The whole farm is interdependent. We stopped buying LPG gas a long time ago—the biogas meets all our cooking energy needs."
The manure from the cows feeds the biogas digester. The slurry that remains returns to the fields as organic fertiliser. Soon, James hopes to complete another piece of the puzzle: a solar-powered pump that will draw water from the stream bordering his land to irrigate fodder during the dry season.
Every investment strengthens another part of the farm.
That interconnected approach is exactly what the Power for Food Partnership (P4FP) seeks to promote across East Africa. Rather than treating renewable energy and regenerative agriculture as separate interventions, the partnership demonstrates how combining them can reduce costs, improve productivity and strengthen farmers' resilience to climate change.
Supported by the IKEA Foundation, coordinated by SNV and implemented in Kenya by Kilimo Trust and other partners, the programme has worked alongside farmers like James to turn these ideas into practical, working models.
Today, James's farm has become one of those models.
Recognised as a reference farm under the partnership, it regularly welcomes neighbouring farmers who come to see the technologies in action, ask questions and learn how similar approaches could work on their own farms.