As a child in Nairobi, Benedetta Kyengo spent holidays climbing trees and eating mangoes and papayas at her grandmother’s food forest in eastern Kenya. Eight years later, every tree was gone, replaced by maize and beans, and her grandmother, who used to send food to the city, was depending on money they sent from it. That reversal, from abundance to dependency in a single generation, is the wound this episode is about.

Benedetta, founder of Feedback to the Future and a practitioner of syntropic agroforestry in Kenya’s semi-arid east, bought five acres of severely degraded land in 2020 and spent the next four years turning it into a 100-species food forest. She describes how terrible droughts almost forced her to quit, why she teaches farmers to be “greedy with water”, stealing runoff from neighbours’ plots and slowing every drop into the soil, and how training hundreds of farmers across 300 acres has measurably changed local rainfall patterns. She also explains how she plans to make this food accessible not to wealthy Nairobi consumers, but to the slum communities she grew up in: by stripping input costs to near zero, saving indigenous seeds, and packaging in the small quantities the slum economy actually runs on.

For anyone asking whether regenerative agriculture can work in brittle, semi-arid landscapes and at a price point that serves ordinary people, this episode is a field report from someone already doing it.

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

HOW THE GREEN REVOLUTION TURNED A FOOD FOREST INTO BARE EARTH IN EIGHT YEARS

Benedetta Kyengo grew up visiting two grandmothers with two entirely different worlds. Her maternal grandmother’s land in eastern Kenya was a food forest: mangoes, papayas, trees to climb, a market stall every Tuesday. Her paternal grandmother’s land, already captured by the Green Revolution, was bare ground when it didn’t rain. Then Benedetta didn’t visit her maternal grandmother for almost eight years. The usual suspects: long days at school and long-distance. When she returned, every tree had been cut. Maize and beans as far as she could see. The grandmother who used to send food parcels to the family in Nairobi’s Mukuru slums was now waiting for money to arrive from the city to buy food.

“After six years, or it was almost eight years, when I visited my maternal grandmother, it was such a pity because the childhood paradise was taken away from me. She had cut down all the trees and everything had transformed into maize and beans fields. That was really painful.” — Benedetta Kyengo

HOW SYNTROPIC AGROFORESTRY ON FIVE ACRES IS CHANGING WHERE RAIN FALLS ACROSS 300 ACRES IN SEMI-ARID KENYA

Bare, degraded soil does something specific when it rains: the water hits, can’t penetrate, and runs off, carrying topsoil with it toward the ocean. Clouds that form over dry land tend to keep moving. But when land holds water, when roots pull moisture up and transpire it into the air, when deep leaf litter slows runoff and lets rain infiltrate slowly into the ground, the local atmosphere changes. Moisture stays in the system. Clouds find reasons to stop. This is the small water cycle, and Benedetta’s syntropic farm in semi-arid eastern Kenya is now visibly operating inside it. Four years in, rain that used to skip the area is landing on it. Neighbours notice. The rivers Benedetta fetched water from as a child, twenty kilometres away, ran dry when the trees disappeared. She believes they can come back.

“I believe we can bring back the rivers. As a kid, we used to fetch water from the rivers. Now all those rivers have become seasonal. So this tells us there’s something that we are doing wrong, and we can regenerate the whole hydrological cycle.” — Benedetta Kyengo

WHY THE FIRST SHOP FOR REGENERATIVE FOOD FROM BENEDETTA WILL BE IN THE SLUMS OF NAIROBI

Benedetta grew up in Mukuru slums. Her mother still lives there. Many of the friends she had as a child, people who never got the chance to leave, still do too. She knows that regenerative food in Kenya, as almost everywhere, has become shorthand for expensive, premium, and urban-affluent. She is building in the opposite direction: radically reducing input costs through vermicompost, rabbit urine as foliar feed, indigenous seed saving, and natural pest management so that prices don’t have to carry the burden of a supply chain designed for wealthy consumers. The packaging will be small, formatted for the slum economy. The first shop will not be in a Nairobi neighbourhood with good roads.

“Why don’t we make this food accessible to the same people in the slum? Our first shop is going to be in the slums, and we build a market where most common Kenyans — who don’t have so much money — can access it.” — Benedetta Kyengo

Photocredit Benedetta Kyengo: The transformation of her land from 2017 to 2024.

Koen and Benedetta also talked about:

• Biodiversity as business resilience
• Investing in water infrastructure
• Farmers become paid trainers

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
• Emmanuel Luwemba – The decentralised business disrupting the seed monopolies in East Africa
• Kofi Boa — You can see soil health in a single season
• Janet Maro — Farmers are the architects, not the audience
  

More about our guest:
Benedett Kyengo is the founder of Feedback to the Future, an organisation based in Kenya building resilient local food systems and restoring degraded landscapes across East Africa through regenerative and circular practices. Since founding it in 2020, she has developed a syntropic agroforestry training programme for smallholder farmers, runs a living-lab farm in Makueni County growing over 80 species of native food crops and medicinal plants, and maintains an indigenous seed bank. A University College Utrecht alumna who returned to Kenya to disprove that semi-arid land is unfit for farming, Benedetta sits at the intersection of hands-on regenerative practice, community co-creation, and the grassroots scaling of food sovereignty in East Africa.

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