00:07AusQuest Farm is 50 kilometres south of Kenya's capital Nairobi in the county of Machakos.
00:15It borders a private nature conservation area and the neighbours are big, small and even striped.
00:25They're vastly different to those Stuart Barden grew up with in Gilgandra in regional New South Wales.
00:32We've got a lot of wildlife around and last night there was a leopard just over there and there's hyenas
00:39come in and drink it just in front of our house.
00:41Like I see cheetahs in the field, all those sort of things. It's unique and it is special and it's
00:48incredible really.
00:50Stuart moved here with his family in 2011, two years after his Nuffield scholarship to study grain growing in low
00:57rainfall environments brought him to Kenya.
01:01Smaller than New South Wales, three quarters of the country is arid or semi-arid.
01:06Despite agriculture being Kenya's main economic driver, it's very vulnerable to climate shocks.
01:12It needs to import more food than it can produce and there's a population of 58 million people to feed.
01:20He came here on a mission to show how Australia's dryland cropping techniques could work here.
01:27We chose this area because it had very heavy soils which once again typically Kenyans would say are just virtually
01:36uncroppable.
01:37Our intention was, and it still is, to demonstrate and basically show the potential of what you can do in
01:44low rainfall areas.
01:49Employing up to 400 people seasonally, operations are split into three separate businesses.
01:55Growing beans and forage sorghum for market, producing and selling silage and building fences for other farmers.
02:04The success of the farm has brought thousands of farmers, business people and politicians to tour the property.
02:12We've had about 14,000 visitors over the time we've been here and that's good and it's sort of been
02:18necessary.
02:20Because if you want to get to policy makers or whatever, you've got to earn the right to be heard.
02:27Stewart says, despite the good work done by non-government organisations, he believes farming projects should be set up as
02:35commercial operations.
02:37If you keep putting $50 notes onto a fire, you'll keep it going until you stop putting them on the
02:42fire.
02:43And that's what you see a lot. So this isn't a project, this is a commercial example for people.
02:50We're fiercely commercial because we know that that's a way to long-term change.
02:56You can't make long-term change, I don't believe, and help people unless you're working from a commercial base.
03:01Well let me know more about Valeryers.
03:01So let's just go on and I look for Kay.
03:03I think I'm rich and I am very, very in front of aHI.
03:03So I'm, I'm quick to have those in front of aury.
03:05I'm going for that for a while.
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