Kitui’s “Ndengu Revolution”: County Guarantees KES 100 Per Kilogram for Green Grams

Kitui County has set up a direct-purchase market for green grams (ndengu) under what it’s calling the “Ndengu Revolution” programme, guaranteeing farmers at least KES 100 for every kilogram sold – with no brokers involved. FarmersTrend reports that the county has also distributed close to 90 metric tonnes of certified seed to more than 6,000 farmers as part of the push, an investment aimed squarely at a crop that has quietly become one of the most dependable sources of cash income for households across Kitui’s drier wards.

The guaranteed farmgate price sits well below what green grams have actually been fetching on the open market in 2026 – the same reporting puts retail prices as high as KES 180 per kilogram, and wholesale around KES 150 – which is exactly the point. The county price is a floor, not a target: it exists to protect farmers from the very low prices a bumper harvest, a flooded local market, or an opportunistic middleman can otherwise force onto them in a bad selling season. In a normal, unprotected market, a good harvest across many farms at once can actually work against individual farmers, driving prices down just as they have the most to sell. A guaranteed minimum breaks that trap, at least for whatever volume the county programme can absorb.

Green grams have become one of Kitui’s most reliable cash crops precisely because they tolerate the county’s semi-arid conditions far better than maize does. Kitui sits within Kenya’s Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASALs), where erratic, often depressed rainfall has made maize an increasingly unreliable bet for smallholders chasing a cash return rather than pure subsistence. Green grams need less water, mature faster, and – crucially for a county trying to build a repeatable, bankable agricultural economy – now come with a price floor that maize growers in the same fields simply don’t have.

The “no brokers involved” detail in the county’s own framing of the programme is not incidental. Broker-mediated crop sales are a long-standing complaint among smallholder farmers across Kenya’s cereal and pulse belts: a broker who advances cash or transport before harvest often locks in a price well below what the crop will eventually fetch, leaving the farmer with little bargaining power by the time the beans are actually ready. A direct county buying point removes that layer entirely, though it also means the programme’s reach is limited to however many buying points and however much working capital the county can actually field in any given season – a guarantee is only as good as the queue of buyers standing behind it.

What this means going forward is less certain than the headline price suggests. A guaranteed floor works well as insurance against a bad season, but it does not by itself solve the harder problems of storage, aggregation, and onward marketing that determine whether Kitui’s green gram farmers capture more of that KES 150-180 retail price themselves, rather than watching it accrue to whoever buys, stores, and resells the crop after it leaves the farm gate. Certified seed distribution – the other half of this programme – addresses yield and consistency, but pairing a reliable seed supply with a reliable minimum price is what actually gives a farmer a reason to plant more of the crop next season instead of hedging back toward maize.

Want to read more about this? FarmersTrend's 2026 guide.