How did someone previously teaching Kiswahili, mathematics and financial accounting make a switch to farming? This is the story of Obadiah Biwot – an unlikely farming hero (which should prove that, regardless of your background, you can succeed in farming too). 

With an undergraduate in Agribusiness Management, Certified Public Accountancy, and a certificate in Computer Applications, you can say that Obadiah tried it all - working in different sectors to meet his daily needs. During a business idea innovation competition, drawing participants from across the entire African continent, he pitched an idea on reducing dependence on rain fed Agriculture by using greenhouse farming and got to the top 25 finalists. The idea was specifically on planting tomatoes.

How did someone previously teaching Kiswahili, mathematics and financial accounting make a switch to farming? This is the story of Obadiah Biwot – an unlikely farming hero (which should prove that, regardless of your background, you can succeed in farming too). 

With an undergraduate in Agribusiness Management, Certified Public Accountancy, and a certificate in Computer Applications, you can say that Obadiah tried it all - working in different sectors to meet his daily needs. During a business idea innovation competition, drawing participants from across the entire African continent, he pitched an idea on reducing dependence on rain fed Agriculture by using greenhouse farming and got to the top 25 finalists. The idea was specifically on planting tomatoes.

Through all these experiences, Obadiah has emerged as an industrious self-driven business development advisor at Heifer Internal where he is responsible for business proposal development and strategic planning for milk producer organizations, organizing and facilitating trainings for staff and farmers, creating sustainable partnerships and progress reports.

As a farmer too, he faces challenges like any other farmer but being the problem solver that he is, he has found way around them. To the most pressing issue of climate change, he resorted to greenhouse farming to avoid the challenge of seasonality. With this, he hopes to harvest tomatoes throughout the year independent of the climatic conditions.

Obadiah says that with the little experience he has had in the sector, he notes that for farmers to succeed, they need to focus on all aspects of farming. This, he said is called the Value Chain Approach.

In common parlance, value chains may infer a series of critical points in a process or journey of a process at which something better happens. The beginning of that journey could be from the concept through production, harvesting, processing, packaging, marketing to the end user. An additional value is added to the product as it travels through the chain so much that what would have been a dull raw commodity is loaded with extras that the consumer is willing to pay a premium price for it. This is what is supposed to be integrated into farming and he is passionate about enhancing capacity and creating efficient value chains in agriculture, particularly in involving youth in farming.

On the use of technology is agriculture, he says Africa has been starved of technology due to unending unhealthy debates. He believes greenhouse farming is a great way to get youth involved in farming as it utilises very small portions of land as the youth do not own large tracts of land and furthermore, greenhouses have high efficiency and high returns.

Obadiah joins YPARD both expectant and with a lot of experiences to share from his work.  “I am hoping to learn more on how to put the ideas that I have into practice. I will be keen to acquiring hints from my mentor on the best practices available. I am interested in being taken keenly through journey that will bring out a competent dairy farmer who is able to secure the world through food.”

“There has been a culture that has always been there people get serious with Agriculture when nearing retirement or after retirement. I am interested in establishing a dairy farm that will change the mentality and convince the world that it is possible for a youth to engage in agriculture. At the end of the mentoring period I am certain that my objectives will have been achieved and I am certain that the beginning of my success had just started.”