Sylvia Kuria started with a kitchen garden and a refusal to use chemicals on food for her newborn. Seventeen years later, she runs Sylvia’s Basket, aggregates organic produce across Kenya, trains smallholder farmers on half-acre plots, and helped get agroecology written into county government development plans with real budget behind it. The journey from that first bottle of pesticides to a funded policy win is not a straight line — and the business realities along the way are rarely the ones that make the headlines.

The question running through this conversation is deceptively simple: should farmers feed themselves first, before thinking about any market? Sylvia’s answer, grounded in seventeen years of practice, has implications for how we think about food security, monocropping, market access, and who gets to sit at the table where decisions are made.

This episode is part of The African Regenerative Frontrunners series is supported by Rootical and co-hosted by The Organic Guy. 

FOOD SECURITY STARTS ON THE FARMER’S PLATE

The standard logic of agricultural development points farmers toward markets: grow more, sell more, scale up. Sylvia’s experience points the other way. The smallholder farmers she works with have half an acre or one acre. When they grow for subsistence, fifty cabbages is too many for home use and too few to justify transport costs to market. Her model flips that: eat what you need, sell the surplus, and build from there.

“It’s very important that farmers start growing their own food first before they take it to the market.” — Sylvia Kuria

That principle also cuts against the dominant crop logic in Kenya. In areas that received no short rains last season, farmers had planted maize, a heavy feeder that needs three to four months of rain. Sorghum, cassava, pumpkins, and sweet potatoes would have fed those communities through the drought. The seeds were available. The choice to plant maize was not made by the farmers.

FROM RETAIL TO AGGREGATION: WHAT THE NUMBERS ACTUALLY SHOW

Sylvia ran an organic retail shop for seven years. It boomed during COVID, created a loyal customer base, and generated enormous fixed costs and food waste with no cold chain. The pivot to B2B aggregation was driven by a simple observation: organic farmers were only selling forty to fifty percent of their produce into differentiated channels. The rest was going into conventional markets with no recognition of the effort behind it.

“With aggregation, it’s working so much better because the farmers harvest the night before. In the morning, it’s at my centre. By midday, I’ve sold everything. So it’s just open and closed.” — Sylvia Kuria

The model also surfaced a problem nobody talks about: grade-two organic produce- the wonky carrot, the scarred tomato- was being composted. High-end schools in Nairobi refused it because their processing machines required uniform shapes. Sylvia now redirects that produce to primary school children in informal settlements around Nairobi. They are eating better organic lunches than the schools that turned it down.

FIFTEEN FARMERS AND A COUNTY BUDGET

In 2021, fifteen farmers in Sylvia’s village spent a year training on agroecology. The following year — an election year — they showed up to public participation processes for the county integrated development plan and submitted activities grounded in agroecological principles. Four out of five submissions were fully funded. A local territorial market was built. Drought-tolerant seed varieties replaced maize distributions.

“We made sure to take advantage of that season. And what we did was that, in the county plans, we actually have a chance to take part in public participation. And in the public participation, we can then be able to see what the county would like to provide for us. And we put in our submission.” — Sylvia Kuria

Kenya now has a national agroecology strategy, launched in late 2024, and five to six counties have developed their own strategies under it. The gap Sylvia identifies is not in the policy itself — it is that farmers at ground level have no idea the plans exist, or that there is budget in them they can claim.

Koen and Sylvia also talked about:

• How a bottle of pesticides handed to a new mother started a seventeen-year organic farming journey
• Why the half-acre plot, not the large commercial farm, is the most important unit in Kenya’s food system
• Whether organic agriculture can actually feed the world and why the question itself needs challenging
• Why civil society should be doing consumer education, not farmers
• Why grassroots organisations doing the real work are being kept out of funding conversations

MORE INTERVIEWS IN THIS SERIES:

• Omoke Brian – Inside Africa’s regenerative agriculture opportunity
• Million Belay – Why the USAID shutdown was a gift to agroecology in Africa
• Ivan Mandela – Unicorns can wait, African farmers can’t
• Olusola Sowemimo – How a Nigerian lawyer built a profitable organic farm with standards, data and community
• Kofi Boa — You can see soil health in a single season
  

More about our guest:
Sylvia Kuria is an organic farmer, entrepreneur, and advocate based in Kenya and a fellow of the African Food Fellowship. She is the founder of Sylvia’s Basket, which aggregates organic produce from smallholder farmers and supplies online supermarkets and restaurants in Nairobi. She trains farmers on half-acre plots to grow their own food first and sell the surplus, and has been instrumental in getting agroecology embedded in county integrated development plans in Kenya. She has been working in organic farming for seventeen years.

Sylvia Kuria is an organic farmer, trainer, advocate, and founder and CEO of Sylvia’s Basket, based in Limuru, Kenya. Over seventeen years she has built Sylvia’s Basket from a kitchen garden into a movement combining farm production, aggregation, training, and policy advocacy. She has trained over 1,000 farmers across Kenya in agroecological practices, aggregates more than five tonnes of organic produce monthly from a network of fifty-plus smallholder farmers, and has been instrumental in embedding agroecology into county integrated development plans.

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