On a sunny morning in Mayange Sector, Bugesera district, Doreen Karehe is busy supervising one of the greenhouses in which juicy strawberries are growing in hydroponics. The 32-year-old is a trained lawyer who has substituted her legal gown to focus on horticulture, particularly growing strawberries, a specialty crop which many Rwandan farmers don’t focus on yet the demand is readily available. READ ALSO: 22-year-old student pioneers hydroponic farming in Rwanda Just when you thought being a lawyer was a prestigious vocation, you would be shocked to learn that Karehe picked the greenhouse over the courtroom and so far, no regrets. In 2020, Karehe and business partner Aline Gaju founded Germin8 Rwanda, a company which uses hydroponics to grow delicious strawberries in a nutrient solution mixed with water. They were among the pioneers of hydroponics, a type of horticulture farming and a subset of hydroculture which involves growing plants, usually crops or medicinal plants, without soil. They grow plants using water-based mineral nutrient solutions in aqueous solvents to get the best quality. Just when they had just started, the Covid-19 pandemic hit and they faced a lot of challenges, but as Karehe says, they learned through all that and today they stand out among fruit bearing commercial farmers in Rwanda. “I have a law background. I'm a lawyer who actually fell in love with agriculture and technology. That's how I actually ended up in agriculture,” recalls Karehe when The New Times visited her at the Bugesera-based farm. With pandemic and other challenges including global warming, which all had a bearing on agriculture, Karehe and her co-founder Gaju set out to do modern agriculture using sustainable technology, without having to rely on rain, sun or nature. “We came up with an idea of strawberries and we said to ourselves why not try it? Why strawberries? There are so many commodities here but mostly we were importing Strawberries. We were not exporting any,” “Hydroponics grow small plants. We can't grow trees. So other plants that can be produced in hydroponics are ‘leafies’ like lettuce and all kinds of small vegetables,” she explains. A cash cow As an agrobusiness, they compared the price of vegetables and strawberries and the latter easily won because there is more demand on the market for strawberries than vegetables. To grow the best quality, Germin8 Rwanda uses Nutrient Film Technique (NFT), which allows them to grow strawberries in hydroponics, inside a greenhouse, without requiring natural soil. “We grow the strawberries soilless. We don't put any soil. We just put them in the in the gutters and then we put the nutrients to feed the strawberries and then they just grow,” “We don't use soil because of the soil-borne diseases there. There is no way we can control soil-borne diseases. That's why we actually use only water to avoid all those things,” READ ALSO: Modern farmer on promoting ‘cool’ farming in Kigali Karehe says they try to control every single situation in the greenhouse to ensure that they get the quality of the berry that they want. Some of the nutrients include Nitrogen in nitrate and ammonium forms, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, iron and many more that make the perfect strawberry. “We calculate nutrients. We know how much nitrogen the strawberry needs. We know how much calcium or iron it needs. We balance all that and then we have an automated facility,” “It is automatic in the sense that when the strawberries need nutrients, it automatically supplies to ensure the sustainability of the strawberries,” she adds. It hasn’t been a journey without challenges, as they have had to deal with the lack of capacity and knowledge on hydroponics. Most of the people who had slight knowledge on hydroponic farming only knew how to do so with soil. “Getting someone who knows anything about soilless farming was a very big challenge,” Karehe says, adding that as such, they have struggled to find people who they can work with. They’ve had to read and struggle on their own. READ ALSO: Rwanda steps up focus on hydroponic farming However, the market for the produce hasn’t been one of the challenges. Strawberries are on demand in hotels, bakeries, supermarkets and individuals who want them for consumption at home. “The reason we've chosen to target those specific clients is because we don't have a lot of strawberries in Rwanda. We're not thinking of exporting at the moment because there is actually a very big market in Rwanda,” the mother of three adds. A predictable sector Considering that they use controlled methods, they produce healthy and organic strawberries which are safe for consumption by all groups of people. Karehe says people are scared of engaging in agriculture but it is a lucrative industry where if you get all your plans together, it will surely pay off because the market is assured. Similarly, today you can do controlled agriculture whose produce is guaranteed and predictable, thanks to new and affordable technologies that make farming less reliant on nature, unlike in the past where agriculture depended on rain. “Some farmers will say what if the rain doesn’t come this month? Here we use a water reservoir. We save the water up to 99%. We reuse the water and reuse the water. We don't waste any,” Karehe explained. She points that agriculture at the moment is so predictable and urges people, especially the youth, to join the sector, as the demand for food is ever increasing globally. “I would actually encourage people, especially the youth, to join the agriculture sector. You really don't have to be in your retirement to start doing agriculture. I think agriculture is a very fascinating thing at the moment because there is a lot of technology there,” “It's predictable, you know exactly what you're going to harvest, when to harvest it, what is in the produce, you can control the sweetness, you can control the size, you can control every single thing,” Karehe said, adding that there is no point in getting scared to start off in the agriculture sector. Karehe studied her primary school at Camp Kigali before joining University of Rwanda to pursue a degree in law and completed her bar course at the Institute of Legal Practice and Development (ILPD).
