Vision Farmers' Organisation

Welcome to VFO!

This website is about one crucial question:

What future do we want for our children?

The answer is in our hands!

***What future for our little ones? Parched Earth or Green Earth?***

We are a a registered grassroots community farming project in Butere, Kakamega County, Western Kenya, registered under Kenyan law to improve community engagement in the improvement of skills, knowledge and education in sustainable farming methods and techniques.

Our members have experienced increasing hadrdship, as climate change changed the profile of our lands and patterns of seasonal rains, soil fertility and agricultural yields. The result was real hardship for many, who began to experience shortage of food, and crops of poor quality, low in nutritional value.

In 2010 some of us began doing research and gathering what knowledge and information we could find, from books, magazines and other sources of agricultural information. That was when we began to undrstand how years of following what were described as ‘modern’ agricultural methods, using fertilisers to feed crops. had in fact depleted our soils, leaving vulnerable to erosion.

The practice of selecting the best seed for food had also left those of lowest quality for planting, but we did not fully appreciate how important the quality of seed is to producing good crops.

That was when some of us began to realise that we had to find sources of learning about better techniques to help ourselves to learning from the past, and began to build our skills towards more sustainable community farming, and found out about permaculture methods.

We began with composting, to re-build soil fertility, and set to weeding the fields that had been planted, to reduce competition for our crops. We selected the best seed from that year’s crop and started preparing firelds for planting.

So we mobilised our best troops: our children!

***Some of our stalwart troops, and best supporters of our project***

We asked them to hgive us a hand to clear and till the soil, tat we could plant seeds, feed with compost and water regularly.

They were wonderful and helpd us willingly, putting their backs into the work… literally!

***We are PROUD of our children, our best land troops!***

Planting followed and we soon had the first green shoots, protected from the sun by dry corn leaves, that would rot down and feed the soil. We were beginning to see our plans take shape.