Sweet melon, a unique fruit with lots of potential and yet to be exploited
As the adage goes, a fruit a day keeps the doctor away. Pratik Patel is one farmer who is ensuring that the fruits are available in plenty. He has transformed fruit farming in Mwakila Village in Makueni County, perceived to be a semi arid area into an agricultural haven of fruits. He has created a new age farming resurgence in an area that has traditionally been synonymous with farming mangoes and low yielding crops like maize and beans.
Mr. Patel, the Director of Yogi Farm, has been in farming since his childhood. His vast travel experience in the Middle East has exposed him to modern farming while pointing him to the yawning gap between production and demand of fruits in the market. His 27 acre piece of land is an amalgamation of farming guavas, pixie oranges and sweet melons. Sweet melons take the lions share and his crops are in drip system irrigation his source of water being river Athi.
Sweet melon belongs to the cucurbits family, just like watermelon. They are normally green, and turns light grey or yellow after ripening. The fruit has several health benefits, such as reducing the anti-inflammatory properties, oxidative stress and kidney cell damage. It also has cancer-preventive antioxidants. The melon seeds are rich in fat and protein.
His journey to fruit farming pushed him to the interior parts of Makueni County in search of cheaper piece of land and one which is close to a reliable source of water and thus how he became domiciled in Mwakila. He grows Galia Melons variety. Other varieties of sweet melons includes, Orange Honeydew, Mello Sweet, Kandy Delicious, Juan Canary, Santa Claus, Kandy Lemondrop among others.
“I have been brought up in India and Kenya where our father was farming coffee and tea. I guess this therefore created inherent shared passion to start my own farming enterprises here in Kenya. I had visited a homestead somewhere in India and found a retired civil servant who had about half an acre on sweet melons. I immediately gained interest and began probing his journey and his story was amazing and encouraging. The civil servant told us he basically lived on earning from his orchard and he did not have any regrets at all. This is where the idea of starting an orchard was conceptualized. I realized this is what I wanted to do, to establish an orchard that will bear fruits for the next many years and make it both as a hobby and a commercial activity. And since then I have not looked back, I have flipped books, manuals, online and read widely the art of good orchard establishment and management,” he coherently said.
Sweet Melon farming in Kenya is almost non-existent, majorly due to lack of information about melon propagation, varieties, required climatic conditions among other reasons It is seen as an exotic fruit that is grown in Egypt and Asian countries. There is a growing interest in sweet melon farming amongst farmers who appreciate the value of the melon. Key to note is that sweet melon requires a warm climate, well drained soils with the right PH of between 5.5 to 6.5 and realistically, most parts of Kenya are now classified as warm and dry. This means sweet melon can do well in most of these parts so long as there is water. Majority of the sweet melons consumed locally are imported and this means there is a huge potential to tap into and grow sweet melons locally and produce better quality than the imported ones.
“I have not had employment for a long time. But the fruit farming in Yogi Farm gave me job security and economically empowered me to take care of my family needs and pay school fees for my children. I have also benefitted from training on new age farming which I hope to apply in my farm,” said Martin, one of the workers at Yogi Farm. The farm has also opened its doors to agriculture students who are on their industrial attachments to perfect their skills.
“We are driven by the Mantra ‘Think Yogi, Think of opportunities.’ The fruit farming revolution that we have initiated in an area that has traditionally been regarded as dry is meant to motivate more people to embrace high yielding, high value crop that will give farmers more returns and economically empower them. We have shown that it can be done,” he said.
Furthermore, the maturity and ripening of the fruits, takes 3 months from planting. This is an advantage, as it allows a farmer to harvest early and the harvesting stage goes for a month before another planting takes place.
“There is a growing demand for sweet melons by a burgeoning middle class especially in Nairobi and Mombasa who are keen on their health and we are warming up to meet this booming demand by increasing our area under production. We want people to enjoy freshly grown fruits even as we contribute to the general health of the citizens of the world. We respond to market needs,” Patel added.
