TARAKWO Farmers trained in Record-keeping

Agriterra has developed the record-keeping workshop as part of the financial management discipline and aims to turn data into intelligence. This workshop underlines the importance of registering data, develops a strategy for record-keeping and a tool for the actual implementation.  

The record-keeping module focuses on business development for the cooperative and consists of three parts:

• A workshop to develop a strategy on record-keeping: the why, what and how of a record-keeping system;

• A tool for the actual implementation of this record-keeping system;

• A toolbox for data registration.

At the end of the 3-day workshop, the cooperative will elaborate a concise action plan with SMART goals for record-keeping.

Cooperatives and farmer's organisations that want to raise awareness among management, board members, extension officers and lead farmers about the importance of record-keeping, and to show the advantages of record-keeping at the member level, primary cooperative level and at the level of the apex organisation can greatly benefit from this workshop. 

Record-keeping is an important element of good farm management, especially on a dairy farm. Majority of farmers do not have a habit of keeping records for their dairy production. Farmers will say that “they do not know how to” while some may claim that “they do not have the time”. Prioritisation of Farm record-keeping is important for all farmers and cooperatives, but they need to be taught and sensitised about it.

Agriterra’s Record-keeping programme addresses the key aspects of:

• “What” are record-keeping and the types of farm records
• “Why” record-keeping is important at farm level
• “When” - the optimal frequency of record-keeping at farm level
• “How” - what needs to be recorded (costs, incomes, production amounts, prices, etc.)

On 17-19th October, Agriterra Kenya organised a record-keeping training for farmers and staff of Tarakwo Dairy company limited.

Tarakwo is a dairy cooperative that has 1500 active farmers. It produces15,000ltrs of milk per day which is collected, chilled and sold to processors, but about 3,000ltrs is processed at their factory and sold through milk ATMs in Eldoret Town.  Tarakwo’s ambition is to increase the milk volumes to 25,000ltrs per day.

The programme manager Ron Van Schaijk was the lead facilitator. Together with a team of newly trained Record-keeping trainers (Marco Streng, Hillary Maket, Olika Urgessa and James Muhangi), they were able to motivate the group and through practical exercises and hands-on activities to help them understand their production, production costs, their sales income and profits. The farmers were happy to learn that with good record-keeping they can make a good decision on how to minimise costs by, for example, producing own feeds which could help save up to 30% of costs as opposed to buying.

The organisation together with the facilitation team developed two (2) templates for record-keeping. The first template will be used to record daily milk production and sales and the other template will be used to record all other costs and sales activities. The farmers consented to use the knowledge they gained to improve their farm management while the staff will be playing a key role in passing on the knowledge to other farmers in the cooperative.

Stellah Wanjiku Nyagah

Stellah is a Business advisor based in Nairobi, Kenya. She joined Agriterra in November 2016