Research and data for Kenya’s food systems.
Read about our mission →Search the Atlas news and analysis library for crop, livestock, trade, county and employment insights.
Kenya’s tracked agricultural income reached KSh 774B in 2023/24.
The Atlas tracks 21 active commodities across all 47 counties, building bottom-up from production volumes × farmgate prices. Total tracked income — KSh 774 billion — sits about KSh 84B above the KNBS Economic Survey’s marketed-production figure of KSh 690B. The gap is informal trade, subsistence consumption, and unmeasured commodities. Both numbers are real.
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Farmgate value is the price a farmer receives at the gate of the farm — before any processing, transport, grading or trader margin is added. Multiplying that price by national production for each commodity gives a like-for-like measure of how much income the rural economy actually earns from growing or rearing it, stripped of the downstream value that accrues to millers, exporters and retailers.
That distinction matters in Kenya, where the gap between farmgate and retail price is unusually wide for some commodities and narrow for others. A crop can dominate supermarket shelves or export manifests yet contribute modestly at the farm gate, while a quieter staple can anchor millions of household budgets. Ranking commodities this way reframes the question from "what does Kenya sell?" to "what actually pays the farmer?"
The chart ranks Kenya's main agricultural commodities by total farmgate value for the 2023/24 season, built bottom-up from production volumes and farm-level prices in the SAFIC Knowledge Base reconstruction. It is the single clearest picture of where agricultural income concentrates — and the foundation every other chapter in the Atlas builds on.
Tea pulls the whole portfolio.
Tea (KSh 218B) sits comfortably above every other commodity. Maize is volume — the staple plate — but tea is value, the export anchor that almost single-handedly keeps Kenya's agricultural trade balance positive.
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View all dashboards →GDP share, real growth, public spending and the Maputo Declaration shortfall.
Maize, tea, coffee, horticulture, sugarcane, flowers, avocado — the seven that define Kenyan farming.
Cattle, dairy, poultry, sheep & goats — and the pastoralist economy on the dryland margins.
Agricultural exports, food import dependency, and the thin net surplus that keeps the sector dollar-positive.
Production, ranked by commodity across all 47 counties — three Kenyas in one country.
Smallholders, gender, youth, formal vs informal — and the productivity gap that pulls workers off the land.
Mission, methodology, scope, source priority order and update cycle.
Every figure cited — KNBS, MoALD, SAFIC, World Bank, FAOSTAT, sector boards.
Latest analysis
All briefs →How the fertiliser subsidy reshaped Kenya's maize harvest
Maize production has climbed from a roughly 34M-bag baseline to ~38M in 2023, with the Fertiliser Subsidy Programme distributing inputs at roughly half private market prices.
Tea is still the single largest export — but margins are tightening
Production volumes hover around 570,000 tonnes; export earnings around $1.4B. Auction prices have softened while costs creep up.
The pastoralist livestock economy is structurally invisible — but huge
Beef plus dairy plus shoats plus camel adds up to a substantial slice of agricultural income, much of it generated on rangelands.
Why Nakuru sits at the top of the county rankings
Nakuru leads on aggregate agricultural value because of mix, not concentration. Diversity is the moat.
Maize gets 30× more government money than coffee
Public spending tracks political economy more closely than commodity value. Maize and fertiliser subsidies dominate the budget.
The KSh 84B gap between KNBS and the Atlas — and what it means
KNBS and Atlas totals measure different pieces of the agricultural economy: marketed production, informal trade and subsistence use.
From the chart desk
Open data explorer →Top 10 counties by agricultural income
Farmgate value, top 6 commodities
Government allocation by commodity (KSh B/yr)
A shared data foundation for coordinated agricultural action.
Agricultural decisions in Kenya — by government, donors, exporters, county officials, agri-SMEs — too often happen on top of fragmented, hard-to-reconcile data. Reports and surveys exist, but they’re scattered. Stitching them together costs weeks per question.
The Atlas consolidates verified national and regional sources into one explorable surface. Macro economics, crop production, livestock, county-level detail, government expenditure, value chains and trade — comparable, citeable, downloadable. Built for analysts, investors, journalists, and the agribusiness sector.