STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- The Horn of Africa has the largest concentration of livestock keepers in the world, as many as 7 million of them in Kenya.
- World Bank funding is fostering private sector opportunities that make pastoralism and livestock keeping a safer and more viable investment.
- Kenya’s thriving farming sectors could help university graduate and school leavers generate income, lowering the youth unemployment rate (currently 16%).
At 37, Sauli Bahati doesn’t project the image of a typical farm manager. His arms are tattooed, and his university degree is in mathematics. But, in Kenya’s changing society, stereotypes are being broken, he says, and the economy reshaped by a younger generation.
At 31, Paul Sirari, his fodder manager is not much his junior. Together, they survey a lush, 3,000-acre field of drought-resistant Maasai love grass, named for its heart-shape seeds and grown here as nutritious livestock feed that also helps improve soil health in Africa rangelands. A few years ago, this field was no more than a stretch of hard dry earth, losing topsoil to the wind. Its transformation, Sirari says, has involved working to improve it “day in, day out”.
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As people say, farming is not for the faint-hearted; it requires hard work and ingenuity. Nonetheless, the need to produce fodder to feed Kenya’s cattle population of 18 million means hay production can be a profitable business, especially during drought years, which Kenya experiences during El Nina cycles.
Encouraging fodder production is part of broader effort to make cattle farming less risky for farmers across the Horn of Africa. How this works in practice can be seen on this commercial farm in Makueni County, 130 km southeast of Nairobi. In 2023, Eastern Green Ltd, for which Bahati and Sirari work, secured a seven-year $1.4 million loan from the World Bank Group-funded De-risking, Inclusion and Value Enhancement of Pastoral Economies (DRIVE) project, channeled through the Kenya Development Corporation (KDC).
With an annual interest rate of 9%, the loan is affordable in a country where borrowing is relatively expensive. “If you were to take a normal loan to do a fraction of what we are doing, you would be splitting your money with the bank,” says Bahati.
DRIVE identified ten private sector-led opportunities linked to pastoralism, allocating a total of $40 million in financial support. Eastern Green Ltd is the only company focused on fodder production. The company has channelled its energies and investments into conservation agriculture and seen the desert bloom. Its acreage has tripled, rising from 1,000 to 3,000.
Eastern Green’s hay bales travel hundreds of kilometers, feeding cattle and sustaining pastoral economies. Workers winnow hay manually before a tractor baler compresses it into 17 kg bundles. Each bale, sold for $0.60-$0.90, shows that agriculture can be profitable and a good area for private investment.
As many as 50 million people are pastoralists in the Horn of Africa, the largest concentration of livestock keepers in the world. As many as 7 million of them are in Kenya, where more than 60% of the population keep a few livestock, typically cows, goats, sheep, camels, pigs or poultry. Livestock comprise 42% of Kenya’s agriculture and contribute to approximately 12% of its GDP.
Despite the sizeable market size for animal feed such as hay, it is not always easy to turn a profit. It takes Eastern Green about $30,000 a quarter in hay sales to cover its costs, and in 2025, with good rains and weaker demand, January to March sales came in just under that. The company, though, which also owns an avocado farm, has never missed loan payment.
“Brisk trade places profitability within reach,” says Jonathan Kaitani, the Chief Financial Officer, who brings Gen X experience to farming, blending well with the problem-solving skills of Millennials like Sirari and Bahati.
Sirari is up for it: “I love being a farmer. I am passionate about it,” he says, adding that he eats, drinks, and sleeps it. They are experimenting with grass varieties, nutritious crops like sorghum, wet sileage, and their own feeding lot to fatten cows for resale.
Jobs are everything. The Eastern Green farm has 150 employees. For 40-year-old Angelina Mwenye, a casual worker, a paycheck brings peace of mind–covering school fees for her three children and providing hay for her four cows, securing her family’s future. The company has upgraded roads leading to the busy Nairobi-Mombasa highway and built sand dams and drifts, making it easier for her and the wider community to access water.
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If farming’s hardships put some Kenyans off, others sense there may be more money to make from a piece of land than sitting at a desk. The option exists to do both. Modern farming from city offices is becoming a common side hustle. “If I can look good with tattoos, and farm,” says Bahati. “Then maybe the Gen Zs and Gen Alphas will be like, ‘if these people are doing it, why not us?”‘
Eastern Green has converted barren land into profitable fodder farm, proving that agriculture can create jobs, sustain pastoral economies, and make livestock farming scalable and sustainable. This success reflects a shift in Kenya’s farming sector from an aging, traditional industry into a more modern, willing to innovate, and profitable models. With such change showing profit, and the youth unemployment at 16%, the government hopes that Millennials and Gen Z will step into agriculture with fresh energy.
At Eastern Green, Bahati and his co-workers embody this change–experimenting with new grass varieties, silage, and feedlots–turning investment in drylands into the ambition of a new generation.