Growing resilience: How Wajir farmer is building a much-needed local fodder industry

By Pauline Kairu

When the 2021–2022 drought came, Abdirrahman Ali Hassan, a livestock farmer in Wajir County, did everything he could to keep his animals alive.

He bought feed. He bought grass transported from as far away as the slopes of Mount Kenya. He moved animals by truck in search of pasture and water, even transporting some towards Garissa and across the Tana River. But the drought was relentless. There was nothing more he could do.

Hassan lost almost 100 cattle and 60 camels, representing between 80 and 90 per cent of his herd. The loss did not end with the animals. “I also lost my savings as I struggled to save the livestock,” he says.

For Hassan, the experience exposed a vulnerability in a livestock economy heavily dependent on natural pasture. When the rains fail for long enough, animals die, and with them goes the wealth and savings that pastoralist households have accumulated over years.

In Wajir, where Hassan estimates that about 70 per cent of livestock perished during that drought, the consequences went beyond individual herds. Families, he says, would sometimes divert food meant for themselves to their animals.

Hassan decided he did not want to face another drought in the same way. In late 2023, he began looking for another way to keep livestock fed through dry periods. He visited farms in different parts of Kenya to see how fodder was produced and researched grasses that could work in Wajir.

At his Shaletey Farm in Wajir North, he started on about two acres, planting varieties such as Juncao, Super Napier, Lusan and sweet potato vines.

“I invested in this. At the back of my mind, I thought I should prepare for the drought season so that it doesn’t affect me,” he says.

Then, in 2024, came the Regional Livestock Programme (RLP), implemented by Mercy Corps and partners.

Hassan was already growing fodder when he saw an advertisement for a co-investment partnership and applied. The process was competitive: he was interviewed and his proposal was vetted. Ultimately, the programme agreed to support him.

The idea was to venture into commercial fodder production. What Hassan had started as insurance for his own herd was about to evolve into something much bigger.

The arrangement required him to contribute half of the investment, with RLP covering the other half. “In fact, the model is such that you implement, then they reimburse the percentage they agreed to cover,” Hassan explains. The approach appealed to Hassan because he would retain ownership of the enterprise rather than become dependent on assistance.

RLP supported the installation of key infrastructure, including a water reservoir, an underground tank holding about 180,000 litres and fodder storage. Hassan invested in equipment and additional infrastructure, including silage bunkers, processing facilities, choppers and hay balers.

The programme reimburses its share after verifying that the agreed work has been completed, rather than giving him the money upfront. The result is an enterprise considerably larger than the two-acre experiment he began in 2023.

Hassan now has about 10 acres under fodder production, with roughly 4,000 bales of hay and 150 tonnes of silage. The stored feed is no longer simply a hedge against drought. It is a business.

Outside the drought season, Hassan sells fodder to livestock farmers and traders who need to feed animals as they are transported to market. That is significant in a place where commercial fodder production remains relatively new.

“In Wajir, most people only know of natural pasture, natural grass, herding the animals, animals trekking,” he says. “The issue of fodder production is a new concept.”

But the idea is beginning to spread. Hassan estimates that about 30 farmers in Wajir County have taken up fodder production after seeing what he was doing. Some have established larger acreages and processing capacities than his own. Many bought planting material from him. He also provides technical advice.

For Hassan, that multiplier effect matters more than the expansion of his own farm. He sees his farm as a kind of living laboratory, testing which fodder varieties perform in Wajir and which ones animals prefer. The aim is not to replace natural pasture, but to give livestock keepers another layer of protection when pasture disappears. “It was and has been an eye-opener,” he says.

The economics also make a case for producing fodder closer to where livestock are kept.

Hassan says fodder is bulky, and transport makes up a large share of its final cost. Feed produced in livestock-producing areas could be considerably cheaper – by up to 50 per cent – than fodder transported from Kenya’s high-potential agricultural regions.

Hassan’s vision is therefore bigger than simply having enough feed for his own cattle. He wants Wajir and the wider northern Kenyan livestock belt to develop a local fodder industry capable of producing and preserving enough feed to see livestock through the next drought.

For Hassan, the lesson from the 2021–2022 drought is that livestock resilience cannot begin when animals are already starving. Preparations have to start when the grass is still green.

That is why he places so much emphasis on fodder as the foundation of the meat industry. “We have to work on the grass first,” he stresses.

Hassan continues: “Meat processing, slaughter, value addition and export may be the visible branches of the livestock economy. But none can function without animals that survive long enough to reach those markets… Without these grasses, without the feed, we have no meat on the table.”

His farm is now also becoming a classroom. Livestock training institutions bring students to see the operation. Extension officers bring farmers for practical sessions. Other organisations have brought pastoralists from across the region to learn how to make silage and bale hay.

Visitors do not simply watch. They use Hassan’s equipment to make silage and bale hay under the guidance of his staff.

The venture remains a work in progress. Water is one of Hassan’s biggest constraints. The farm relies on a public water pan constructed by the National Drought Management Authority, which Hassan shares with livestock and local residents. During dry periods, the pan can dry out.

He has already seen the consequences. At one point, about half of his Juncao stand dried out. When the rains returned, he was able to recover the crop using planting material he had retained.

The experience reinforced another lesson: No single fodder crop can eliminate climate risk. For Hassan, resilience means building several layers of protection – having different fodder varieties, stored hay and silage, crops with different nutritional qualities and, ultimately, reliable water. The thinking is rooted in the memory of what happened to his herd four years ago.

He is no longer simply trying to rebuild the animals he lost. He is attempting to change the conditions under which the next herd will be raised. The goal, he says, is for drought to remain merely a difficult season rather than become a disaster that brings the livestock economy to its knees.

“If this continues, and sensitisation and awareness is created, people will be much better prepared for the drought cycles that are to come,” Hassan says. “And the impact will be well mitigated.”

For Mercy Corps, Hassan’s farm is part of a broader attempt to strengthen the livestock system in some of the region’s most drought-prone areas.

The organisation’s RLP, implemented with IGAD, Helvetas and Welthungerhilfe, and funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and the French Development Agency, is working across livestock systems in the Horn of Africa to strengthen production, markets and resilience.

The programme works along livestock trade corridors rather than simply following county boundaries, linking areas where animals are produced with the markets they eventually reach.

On the Kenyan side, its work extends across livestock-producing areas of north-eastern Kenya and into wider regional corridors connecting Kenya with Somalia and Ethiopia.

The philosophy is deliberately different from a conventional aid model. Rather than providing the same intervention to every farmer, the programme aims to demonstrate that a business model can work, attract private actors and allow the market to grow around it.

“We are not intending to scale it ourselves,” says Mercy Corps’ Regional Livestock Programme Director, Dr Diba Dida Wako. “We demonstrate and we crowd in.”