Edmonton Couple Strives to Help Small-scale Kenya Farmers Work Their Way Out of Poverty

Jerome and Ella Mae Cupido, longtime members of West End Christian Reformed Church in Edmonton, Alta., have spent the past four years investing in helping small-scale Kenyan farmers maintain nutritious food for their animals through periods of drought. The venture, focused on manufacturing hand-fed hay balers, sees Jerome Cupido making frequent trips to Maanzoni, Kenya, staying 13,500 km (8,390 miles) from home for as long as three months at a time.

“Going back to Kenya is difficult. It means being alone, separated from those I know and love, and facing the challenges that come with life in a third-world country,” Cupido wrote in a letter to supporters ahead of his most recent trip on May 6. He continued, “It means I am privileged to be able to carry on developing a business that has the goal of changing lives by introducing mechanization to pastoralist farmers in East Africa, bringing hope, raising the standard of living, and enabling. We also hope this business will provide a living for us.”

The idea for this baler project began 24 years ago when Cupido was part of a feasibility study team from the Northern Alberta Diaconal Conference, an organization of deacons within Classis Alberta North. The team was looking at implementing the Cattle in Kenya Project, headed by professor and researcher Harry Spaling at The King’s University in Edmonton (now emeritus). The study found that while Kenya’s rainy season promotes phenomenal growth of nutritious grass and other vegetation, the very hot and dry season that follows degrades the vegetation to the point that it dies. When farmers cut the healthy grass and pile it for later use it’s left exposed to high heat and oxygen and natural oxidation results in less nutritious feedstock. Fed on this source, cattle, goats, and sheep lose weight, produce less milk, and can die.

“The obvious answer,” said Cupido, whose line of work in Edmonton is the design and fabrication of manufacturing equipment, “was building something that would preserve the nutritious grass for feeding livestock during the long hot dry seasons and drought periods. We resolved to design, develop, and manufacture a small baler that could be hand fed and moved manually.”

Baling packs the grass very tightly so that it won’t oxidize or degrade because the air can’t get to the inside of the bale.

“In 2000, I had promised one of the directors of the Maasai Rural Training Center that I would design a proper hand-fed baler for him,” Cupido recalls. After working on two different prototypes in his shop in Edmonton, he returned to the training center in 2017. “I fulfilled that promise by traveling to Kenya with the baler, delivering it to his farm, and showing him how to

use it,” Cupido said. “It proved to be a huge success.” Recognizing the possibility of changing many more lives by making the technology more available, Cupido decided to start producing balers in Kenya, employing local workers to do the job.

Although they have some financial support from contributions of individuals from five different Christian Reformed churches in Alberta and B.C., the Cupidos are bearing a lot of personal cost with Jerome traveling to Kenya for months at a time and forgoing work and income in Edmonton.

“We believe we are called to use our gifts of invention and craftsmanship not just for our own benefit but to benefit others,” Cupido said. “Supplying the need of basic machinery for hard- working African farmers presents an amazing opportunity to raise their standard of living. We seek to live out our Christian faith and walk with our Maker through our investment of our time, work, and financial resources.”