Once viewed as worthless, the humble croton nut of East Africa has proven to be a valuable source of biofuel, fertilizer and even chicken feed
The nuts from the croton trees used to fade back into the earth in northern Kenya, while their slim, silvery branches were the favored firewood for small farming communities.
But in 2013, when people in villages like Gachika learned that a company was paying money for the nuts to turn them into fuel, hundreds of struggling subsistence farming families took to the forests.
“I didn’t know that these trees or seeds were useful for anything,” said the farmer Martin Ndirango, who is now the second-largest supplier for the company, called EFK Group. He pays collectors around US$0.50 per kilogram of croton nut and sells them to the company for $1 to make organic fertilizer, animal feed, fuel and briquettes sold at roughly three times the price.
EFK Group’s 62-year-old chairman Alan Paul, grew up in Zimbabwe and now lives in the town of Nanyuki, northwest of Mount Kenya. He said that he set up his “one man band” company in 2012 after being “inspired by the concept of the social enterprise that involves the community.”
Bounding down a compost hill, sending mice fleeing ahead of him, this self-described serial entrepreneur held up handfuls of croton husks to show that they ferment at around 20 °C. Paul originally realized the potential of the nut when he worked as a development consultant, researching biofuels. When the project was dropped, he singlehandedly founded a small backyard operation based on this natural product he said was “literally lying on the ground.” He grew it into a business with a factory, 12 staff and an annual turnover of $100,000.
“I took the concept and in six months had bought a factory and machines”, then employed sales and marketing people to build a network of 2,000 collectors and a client base from scratch.
For the first year, the company made biofuel from the squeezed nut, quickly selling out of this diesel substitute to clients such as a paint factory in Nairobi (which uses it as an ingredient) and a tannery (which uses it in place of palm oil). The unprocessed oil can also go into any diesel machine as an alternative fuel.
To avoid wasting the croton husk, EFK Group created Kenya’s first certified organic fertilizer and persuaded businesses growing flowers and vegetables bound for Europe that its product would be better than the chemicals they used. The company now credits itself with having inspired many organic copycats.
A high-protein seedcake for poultry followed after Paul noticed the birds pecking around the factory after hours. He hopes that one day his poultry feed will replace 5,000 of the 30,000 tonnes of protein cakes imported annually to Kenya.
A briquette to replace charcoal will be on the market soon. Paul’s next plans are to get biofuel into the area’s many generators and water pumps, and crack the cosmetics market, too.
Growing at a rate of 40 percent per year, EFK Group can’t keep up with demand for its products and the 500 tonnes of nuts it harvests annually is “only a tenth of what we want to be doing,” Paul said.
He hopes to extend to neighboring countries where underdeveloped agriculture means abundant croton (the nut grows in eight African countries) and he said the environmental and community benefits make EFK Group more than just a business. “We are seeing the results of our initial operation far greater and far wider than a company producing a product from a factory.”
As for Ndirango, he originally doubted the friend who told him that a local company would pay for the nuts, but spent a day collecting some anyway. He returned home to discover sackloads more standing outside his front door. “I don’t know who told these kids, but that evening, I found a line of small kids waiting for me.” Two weeks later, he called the company to come and pick up five tonnes of nuts.
“Most of the people around this area are unemployed, so when they got an opportunity, they grabbed it,” said Ndirango, who like other cash croppers now earns more from croton than coffee. “Everyone was so happy and celebrating” when the money started rolling in.
With $40,000 of EFK Group’s revenues going back into the local community, he said nobody is cutting down the trees anymore.
“Before, we would cut down these trees in a very bad way, as everyone would say that these croton trees had the best charcoal. But now, we see the advantage of them. We can collect the seeds, get cash and buy food, and the trees stay.”
By Hannah McNeish for Sparknews
