Farmers relying on feed analysis services at the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organisation (KARLO) labs in Thika are experiencing costly delays due to a malfunction in the analysis machines that has persisted for almost four months now.
They now have to wait for up to a week to receive the results of their animal feed analysis.
Sources explain that there is an issue at the KARLO labs in Thika: “One of their machines broke down almost four months ago, and it’s causing a lot of problems for farmers.
‘Normally, when we send our animal feed samples for analysis, we expect to get the results back within a few days, but ever since the machine broke down, it’s been taking them a whole week to process our samples.’
“Just the other day, they even had a water shortage, which made things worse. Can you imagine waiting a whole week just to find out if your animal feed is okay? It’s really frustrating.
“And to make matters worse, they’re doing everything manually at the head office, which is slowing things down even more.”
“We’re just asking Karlo to fix their machines and sort out this mess,” a farmer said.
“We rely on these analysis results to make decisions about our livestock, and these delays are costing us both time and money.”
“Hopefully they’ll listen to our concerns and do something about them soon,” the farmer added.