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.