Dairy industry

Overview
Dairy sub-sector in Kenya is considered the most developed in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a history spanning over a period of 100 years. Some of the turning points in dairy development in Kenya began way back in 1900. By about 1910, pioneer dairy settlers were making dairy products such as cheese, butter and ghee for both local consumption and export. By 1935, Kenya had a pure dairy herd of about 100,000 heads strictly confined to large scale settler farms. Today, Kenya has a national dairy herd of about 3.5 million heads (60% pure-bred and 40% cross-bred). At present, the industry is largely run by smallholder resource-poor rural households (estimated at between 800,000 and 1 million) owning about 80% of the total national herd. These households collectively produce over 80% of the total national milk output. The current national milk output is estimated at 4.2 billion litres per annum, out of which 60% is from pure grade dairy cattle and their crosses. The remaining 40% comes from zebu, camel and goats. It is further estimated that, informal milk sector accounts for more than 70% of the 40,000 jobs in dairy market alone and further directly supports over 350,000 others in the formal employment sector. Considering that there are nearly 1 million smallholder farmers, for whom dairy is a family business, it is likely that more than 2 million people derive livelihood directly from the dairy sub-sector.

Naivasha Fiesian herd	Naivasha herd of Friesian X Sahiwal crosses	Pure stand of Boma Rhodes (Chloris gayana)
Friesian cow in Naivasha	Naivasha Friesian X Sahiwal cow	Pure stand of green leaf desmodium (D. intortum)

Dairy research at KARI Naivasha
National Animal Husbandry Research Centre (NAHRC/Naivasha) was established in 1903 as an experimental/quarantine station and in 1937, it was recognized as research station. During this period, the centre was primarily serving the settler dairy farmers. Following the attainment of independence in 1963, occasioning the drastic decline of large-scale farms and rapid increase in small farm holdings, the role of the centre progressively shifted towards the smallholder dairy farmers. Today, the centre has a national mandate on all aspects of livestock husbandry. Dairy is one of the key research sections serving a wide range of clienteles (farmers, researchers, feed millers, training institutions, policy makers, among many others). The section endeavours to address the national goal of being self-sufficient in milk and milk products. This goal embraces the national development agenda as articulated under the agricultural sector development strategy (ASDS). ASDS emphasizes on making the dairy sub-sector profitable and sustainable so as to adequately contribute towards poverty alleviation, food security improvement and employment creation, particularly among the rural poor.  This is also in line with the Kenya’s vision 2030. To achieve this, the section is primarily targeting the smallholder dairy farmers as the prime movers of the sector. Further, the section is keen on spurring increased agricultural growth, improved resource-use efficiency and the total farm productivity through integration of dairy in farming systems and increasing synergies with a wide range of stakeholders. The research programme is designed to cover important dairy development issues. To address these issues, the programme conducts both controlled laboratory-based strategic and participatory field-based adaptive research. Across both strategic and adaptive research, wide spectrum of stakeholders is deliberately involved so as to ensure relevance of developed dairy technologies.

Current research agenda
• Development and supply of improved dairy breeding stock to spur high dairy productivity in various production systems
• Generate and supply wide range of dairy ration formulation techniques for all dairy stakeholders, with emphasis on smallholder resource-poor rural households
• Developing and disseminating sustainable farming systems approaches, that emphasizes on efficient integration of all farm enterprises
• Develop suitable mechanisms for enhancing utilization of crop residues and agro-industrial by-products for dairy production
• Developing and supply of high quality pasture and fodder/forage germplasms for use in various agro-ecological environments
• Developing and disseminating mechanisms for ensuring feed and dairy products safety, especially at producer level
• Fostering the development and dissemination of dairy products’ value addition
• Fostering the integration of socio-economic approaches into all research undertakings
• Developing and disseminating dairy health management strategies
• Establishment and maintenance of dairy data base and repository of scientific dairy information
• Developing training modules for training various girders across all dairy stakeholders

Research focus
1.  Fortified dairy feed research
2.  Farming systems research
3.  Agro-by products research
4.  Fodder and pasture research
5.  Dairy feed safety research
6.  Milk processing and handling research (coming soon)
7.  Socio-economic and policy research
8.  Dairy health management research
9.  Dairy breed development and multiplication
10.  Technology packaging and dissemination (coming soon)