Tea Menance in Vihiga [ii]

Read ⨠ Tea Menace in Vihiga [i]

Today there are two hundred tea farmers at Mudungu Tea buying centre and approximately 17,000 for Mudete tea factory, largely drawn from Sabatia and Vihiga sub-counties. Women are mainly the beneficiaries, picking and cashing peanuts. Where men are involved, they are now selling to the shylocks. Men who were first owners have died, their tea-numbers succeeded to their wives and if the wife is now dead, very few families have succeeded to the kin’s names. 

Succession in the context of Vihiga would mean splitting the once several tea bushes amongst several beneficiaries. It would mean being given a new number, different from the first owner, to a current one. The production will be low. This, and competition from Chepkumia Tea Factory, is why Mudete Tea Factory is receiving fewer kilos of tea. 

pic: Farmers selling tea at roadside and not in the established bandas. source; farmkenya

A kilo is gross paid at Ksh 20/- a month. For a farm of 0.2ha, you are more likely to harvest 200 kilos a month. This is if the season is wet, the rain is gentle and the ground is fertilized and weed-free. From that the factory will cut Ksh. 1.5 for Fertilizer, a mutating percentage for tax, such other deductions as cooperative savings and loans, health insurance etc. There is little left in the (200*20 – [deductions]) tea matrix. 

It needs a lot of your time, this tea. Picking would take 6 hours, mainly early morning in dew and mid-morning under the sun. There is carrying to the banda and rush to be on time. Employing someone to pick for you costs between Ksh. 200-300 daily. If food is served, those are extra costs assumed hospitality. There is another option of Ksh. 10 per kilo of tea, where at most, a fast picker can do 17 kilos. Though averagely it is 12 kilos per picker per day. Amounting to Ksh. 120-170 per person per day. 

When well maintained, a tea farm should be picked four times in a month, a regeneration of seven days. For the little 0.2ha piece, this will not happen if the tea is cut for regrowth, if the hails descend and if the family is disturbed in any way – there are family happenings as deaths, lack of time etc that interrupts the presumed optimum benefits from tea, a reason to their presence. With this, tea can be picked thrice at most in a month. For 0.2 ha it can take 2.5 days two people at the aforesaid budget and kilos. 

Today as one walks by the lower sides of the farms where it was serene with tea, many bushes have been neglected. Others have leased to the factory, to manage itself. Apart from the yearly bonus that comes with elephant slashes (a poor farmer paying for a loan defaulter), there is little from the tea bushes occupying beautiful lands of Vihigians. At times a poor owner will sell to Chepkumia the day’s harvest full of unwanted leaves by Mudete Factory. They do not mind, those cashnow roadside Chepkumia shylocks. It is a free market and Mudete Tea Factory no longer has a monopoly on the bushes. They are as foreign as Chepkumians if you visit the factory – bleeders of the status-quo farmers.