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{
    "id": 817921,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/817921/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 35,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Nyaribari Chache, JP",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Richard Tong’i",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 2611,
        "legal_name": "Richard Nyagaka Tongi",
        "slug": "richard-nyagaka-tongi"
    },
    "content": " Thank you, Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker. Hon. Kamanda is my good friend and one of my advisers, a man that I am so very proud of. He is a senior guy that we have around. As I was saying, farming is a key industry in Kenya and all of us have a duty to ensure that we succeed in it. When I was growing up as a young man, I remember our mum would take us to the farm. But, looking back and having benchmarked with the rest of the world how they are doing farming, I have a feeling that we would have done it better; we would have improved that kind of farming for the good of our families and the country. Even our taxes would have gone up. I remember we used to grow many cash crops in those days. Coffee was one, pyrethrum was another, and maize was a crop that we all grew. But, we were not doing it in a modern way where we would get value for our money and time. I urge we set aside a budget as a Government where we are going to invest in terms of civic education and agricultural training for our people so that they appreciate farming. If you go to our schools today and you speak to the children who are in school to ask them what they want to be when they finish school, very few will say they want to be farmers. That is because we have not made farming attractive; it is because we have not made farming paying or lucrative. It is time we did that. I was watching TV last night. I saw some farming in the Netherlands where a farmer has about 200 animals in an acre of a farm while we have thousands and thousands of acres but the kind of farming and cows we are keeping cannot be compared with what is happening elsewhere. The world is now competitive, it is a global village and, we cannot keep doing things the way we were doing before and expect to see something different."
}