Eva Gachoki: The Farmer Who Wants Other Farmers to Win

Eva Gachoki is a fintech lawyer who now farms 107 acres in Kiambu, she started with five acres in 2020. She grows French beans on a continuous cycle, planting every 21 days, January to January. Last year she became the first person in Kiambu to grow rice, on 20 acres of black cotton soil that kept drowning her beans.In this conversation she lays out the economics most farmers are never shown. Paddy rice leaves her farm at KES 65 a kilo and reaches the shelf at 170. French beans cost roughly 70 shillings a kilo to produce; brokers offer 60. Thrips took 16 acres across four cycles this year, so she stopped planting for a month rather than repeat the loss. She also walked into six banks with signed contracts, six years of statements and a working farm, and was asked for collateral.What she wants instead: farmers in the room when policy is written, agribusiness training that goes past the science, technology built for Kenyan soil rather than adapted from someone else's, and a collective model where small farms are treated as a single unit. If you build agritech, lend to agriculture, or write policy for it, this one is worth the 90 minutes.