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{
    "id": 433877,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/433877/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 167,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. Ndiritu",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 1539,
        "legal_name": "Samuel Mathenge Ndiritu",
        "slug": "samuel-mathenge-ndiritu"
    },
    "content": "Thank you, hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker. I rise to support this Bill. Basically, I come from a rural setting. My constituents are dependent on peasant and dairy farming. Therefore, fertilizer is a major component in increasing their yields. At this point, I would like to thank Egerton University for the soil survey they carried because it will help our farmers to have more faith in other types of manure other than fertilizer. We have been insisting on DAP which in some cases, its use has been found to be obsolete. I would also like to point out that the Government has been successful in subsidizing fertilizer that it has been importing. I would imagine a case where the Government would get out of it and get this fertilizer through businessmen. We know we have petroleum products and, somehow, the prices are the same. The Government can follow up so that we do not eliminate businessmen completely from this. I also congratulate the governor because he made a lot fertilizer purchases which were supplied to farmers in Nakuru. Farmers in every ward were able to get about 10 tonnes of fertilizer and this went a long way in helping them. We got the fertilizer in time. We would like to have an authority, as had been proposed by the Mover of the Motion; that can detach the business of supplying fertilizer from the Government. We need an independent authority that can make use of businessmen. There is the issue of animal feeds. Most farmers in the rural constituencies depend on small scale farming as well as dairy farming. Even in my constituency, that is the only place farmers get their income from. With regard to dairy farming, I am always sympathetic because you will find farmers rearing herds of cows which, at the end of the day, produce nothing. If only the Government could subsidize animal feeds and services like Artificial Insemination (AI) and also the drugs for livestock, that would go a long way in improving the livestock herds. It is very uneconomical for a farmer to have a herd of ten or 20 cows on a ten-acre piece of land and yet, he cannot feed or take care of them. I know some of them attract VAT. The authority would look, in a holistic manner, at the whole issue of peasant dairy farming and even large scale farming with the view of subsidizing inputs. I have talked about the AI. It is very important. That is because they cannot buy the pedigree cows that cost, say, Kshs50,000. If the cost of getting AI comes down like it used to be in the past, that is, Kshs200, the farmers will be able to upgrade their herds and get fewer cows that can produce more milk. This will be very good because dairy farming puts money in the farmers’ pockets every month unlike other farming, where you have to wait for, say, a whole year to harvest. So, this authority is coming at the right time and I hope it is going to organize farmers and put money in the pockets of peasant farmers."
}