When Daniel Njiru's salary doubled, he did not change his lifestyle. Instead, he started looking for a way to turn the extra income into an asset that could keep growing.

In 2022, a neighbour offered him a bare half-acre for Sh70,000 under a 10-year lease. Njiru paid from his savings, planted 470 coffee seedlings and began building the coffee farm he had wanted to pursue for years.

Four years later, the 31-year-old IT specialist has nearly 10 acres under coffee and close to 7,000 stems spread across leased and rehabilitated farms in Kirinyaga.

His interest in coffee started at home. Njiru grew up in a coffee farming family and watched his father, a teacher, use proceeds from coffee to educate his children.

"My dad was just a teacher, but he had coffee farms from which he earned money to put us through school. It was up to us as siblings to figure out that farming has money," he says.

Coffee also appealed to him because it is a long-term investment, although he knew it would require patience before the returns became significant.

"Coffee is the plant that can be there for like 70 years, and you can harvest from it for a very long time," says Daniel.

After graduating from Karatina University in 2017, Njiru joined the IT sector where he thrived, his salary doubling every so often. He chose to save a large portion of his income, eventually building the capital that would finance his entry into coffee farming.

"I was pretty minimalistic. 70 per cent of my salary was earmarked for savings," he says.

After leasing his first half-acre plot in 2022, he leased another half-acre the following year and planted 400 seedlings. In 2024, he moved into rehabilitating abandoned coffee farms, leasing neglected plots at about Sh100 per stem per year.

Njiru’s biggest expansion came in 2025, which he describes as the year he "went all in." He leased an acre of abandoned coffee for Sh1.6 million and five acres of new land for about Sh2.7 million, adding 3,500 stems in one year using his savings.

This year, he has added another acre for close to Sh2 million, together with three-quarters of an acre and another half-acre of bare land under 15-year leases.

Njiru grows several coffee varieties because each offers different advantages. Ruiru 11 is a dwarf, disease-resistant variety that he says can reduce production costs by about 30 per cent, while SL28 and SL34 are valued for the cup quality sought by exporters but are more vulnerable to disease. K7 offers partial resistance to coffee berry disease.

On one of his farms, about 380 stems produce an average of 12 kilogrammes per stem, giving him roughly 4,560 kilogrammes. He attributes the yield to consistent management and the age of the trees.

"I have met farmers producing as little as five kilos per stem," he says.

Njiru wants to raise his average yield to 15 kilogrammes per stem as he expands his acreage and improves farm management.

He sells coffee cherry to the factory at between Sh153 and Sh156 per kilogramme. With a target of 15,000 stems producing an average of 10 kilogrammes each, he estimates that a harvest could generate about Sh22 million at Sh153 per kilogramme.

At that scale, he says, investing in local processing and eventually exporting his own coffee would become more practical.

The returns from coffee come after substantial expenditure, something Njiru says prospective farmers need to understand before getting into the business.

He estimates that getting one seedling into the ground costs close to Sh200, excluding labour, fertiliser, digging the planting hole and soil preparation. With thousands of stems, the cost can quickly run into millions of shillings.

During one rehabilitation exercise, he spent Sh1.8 million in a single month. After the trees are established, he budgets close to Sh800 per stem each year for spraying, fertiliser and general maintenance.

Soil preparation and the correct mixing of manure also require specialist input, while irrigation and labour add to the cost of establishing and maintaining the farms.

Some of the investment has also been lost. On one farm, Njiru lost 300 of 700 seedlings because of inadequate watering during a period when money was tight. At another nursery, more than 1,800 seedlings were planted, but only a small fraction survived.

He later began using coffee husks as mulch to retain moisture, which significantly improved survival rates in subsequent plantings.

His farms are in Kirinyaga, which is one of Kenya's main coffee-producing counties. Data from the Agriculture and Food Authority (AFA) shows that Kirinyaga was the largest source of Kenyan coffee sold directly to overseas markets in the quarter to March 2026.

The county accounted for 52.7 per cent of total direct sale volumes, followed by Kiambu at 16.9 percent and Murang'a at 12.3 percent. Kirinyaga exported 1,678,770.80 kilogrammes directly during the quarter at an average price of Sh52,800 per bag, earning growers Sh1.77 billion.

Although Njiru continues to acquire and lease farmland, he says the biggest constraint is raising enough capital to expand while waiting several years for newly planted coffee to reach full production.

"A farmer paid Sh300,000 from a harvest often cannot convert that into land for four to eight months, given how long negotiations take," he says. Formal financing is available, he says, but it can be expensive.

His IT career also makes managing the farms more demanding. His work requires him to travel for roughly half the year between Madagascar, Naivasha and Tanzania, but he has continued expanding and managing the farms without employing a farm manager.

"I usually dedicate weekends, especially Sundays, to the farms," he says.

Njiru's IT background has influenced the way he manages the farms. He uses soil testing to guide fertiliser application, spray machines for pest control and weeding machines to reduce labour costs.

He also uses Excel spreadsheets to track farm expenses and keep records of what he spends on each plot.

In 2025, Njiru became more active online, using the platform to research coffee farming, share what he was learning and promote his work on social media.

He reads scientific papers on coffee agronomy, tests findings such as fertiliser timing on his own farms and shares the results with other farmers, an approach he describes as becoming "a small journalist."

"Farmers call me almost every other week to say how my content has changed how they farm," he says.

The online following has also created a market for his seedlings. He now sells between 5,000 and 10,000 grafted coffee seedlings each month. His target is to reach 15,000 stems within three years, which would take him close to the 100,000 kilogramme production mark he considers the threshold for serious investment in processing and export.

lowoko@ke.nationmedia.com