Samuel Agachucha, 34, beams with excitement, heading to his favourite spot under a tree at the expansive pyrethrum plantation in Kijabe, central Kenya.
With the midday sun increasingly getting hotter, Agachucha joins the rest of the plantation workers for quick lunch before planning the next set of activities.
"It was hard to get a job in the city and city life was much more expensive. Now, I have a job right at home. It has changed my life. I had nothing to give to my wife. Life was harder before without a job," said Agachucha, a labourer at the pyrethrum plantation in Kijabe, 60 km outside the capital, Nairobi.
Kenya, once the world's leading producer of pyrethrum, the natural ingredient used in the manufacture of insecticides and other pesticides, has seen the production of the crop drop drastically due to delayed payments of crop deliveries and lack of proper management within the sector.
Chinese investor Li Changhong, the Director of DLI International Trade Limited, currently investing in reviving the pyrethrum farming in central Kenya, is convinced the revival of the crop offers the world an environmentally-safe pesticide.
"I came to Kenya in 2008 to prospect for investment opportunities. I found pyrethrum was the best product from Kenya which I could export to China," Li told Xinhua at his pyrethrum plantation, at the heart of central Kenya, sitting on a confluence of three different counties.
Li's arrival in the once unused parcels of land neighbouring the natural forests along the border area of Kiambu county, Nyandarua and Nakuru counties in Kenya, has given the farmers hope for the future.
Agachucha, who inherited a half-hectare of land from his father, hopes to begin the planting of pyrethrum, convinced the maize and beans, which his father has been relying upon in recent years, has become a target of marauding monkeys, which regularly spoil the maize plantations.
In an effort to transform the lives of the farming community in central Kenya, Li's company has helped the community to create a community organisation, which combines forestry conservation activities with crop growing, a key social investment which has transformed the lives of many villagers.
Tabitha Kamau, 56, the farm coordinator and the leader of the local community organisation, said the production of pyrethrum in Central Kenya is gearing for a massive transformation, thanks to the technology transfer that has come with Li's investment in agri-processing and plant exports empire.
"We are very happy to have learnt how to prepare the pyrethrum from the tree nurseries to the farm all the way to the harvesting process," said Kamau, who is also the local forestry conservation coordinator.
"We are now teaching other members of the community how to plant pyrethrum. In this way, we shall be a community that is self-sufficient in our needs, not just in the production of maize, but also pyrethrum," he stressed.
Li, who has a 40-year lease of 150 hectares of land in Kijabe for farming, said he has opened discussions with the Nyandarua County Government, for the expansion of land under pyrethrum plantation to 3,000 hectares within the next two years.
The idea is to rapidly increase the area under crop production as Li begins plans to have a pyrethrum processing plant built in Kenya to ease the local processing and the export of the commodity.
"It is not too easy to plant pyrethrum in China. The conditions that favour the plant is much harder to obtain in China. In Kenya, I have more productive workers. In two years, I hope to be able to build the pyrethrum factory," Li said.
The Chinese agro-entrepreneur plans to hold talks with suppliers in China next month for the construction of the 40 million yuan (7 million U.S. dollars) pyrethrum plant in Nairobi.
Despite the bureaucratic difficulties in Kenya, Li said local politicians are cooperating and urging the community to embrace pyrethrum farming.
The production of the crop, dropped from a peak of 100,000 tonnes, when it was Kenya's fourth largest foreign-income earner in the 1980s, to just 10,000 tonnes in recent months.
Li said his plan is to reach 5,000 farmers of the crop by giving them seeds and using the trained farm workers to spread the plantation as part of the crop revival plan.
Zipporrah Wacheke, a production manager at the farm, said the yields have been dwindling as a result of a two-year drought in Kijabe. The crop is harvested every 14 days. Instead of the peak production of 600 kgs of flowers for every hectare of the 70,000 hectares under the crop, the workers manage only 250-300kg because of the draught.
The farm not only helps the community to revive the pyrethrum farming. The local community has also been able to revive education by creating a new school, which has teachers supported by the local community. At least five teachers are paid directly from the proceeds of the farm workers.
After more than two decades of a downward spiral, caused by the delayed payment of the farmers' proceeds, Li's investment in the pyrethrum farms has more people taking an interest, because he offers cash upfront at 1.40 dollars per kilogramme to farmers for crop deliveries.
This is a break from the Pyrethrum Board of Kenya, the state agency tasked with the management of the crop, from production to marketing and regulation of farm prices.
