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From Loss to Learning:
1. Where It All Began
Before Booran Ka’uu became a structured beef enterprise, it began with one man’s passion for livestock trading — and one painful lesson.
“2015 is when I actually did the first initial trade,” recalls Liban Roba, founder of Booran Ka’uu Farms. “But prior to that, it’s always been, for the longest time, a passion-driven idea.”
That passion came from more than just a love for livestock. Liban saw the sector’s potential — both for income and for transformation in Kenya’s arid lands.
“It was about commercial viability, market dynamics, and the ability of it as a sector to transform the lives of the people where I come from (Northern Kenya) — the pastoral farmers,” he says.
With optimism and a bit of hay in store, Liban purchased around forty-one Boran cattle — emaciated but promising — and transported them in two trucks to his farm in Laikipia. The plan was simple: feed them, fatten them, and sell quickly.
What followed was a harsh initiation into the realities of livestock production.
“After about a week, the death rate was almost three cows per day,” he recalls. “Out of the forty one, one survived.”
He pauses, removing his cap to reveal the toll the stress took.
“I lost a bit of hair in the process,” he jokes — laughter easing the weight of memory.
The cause, he later learned, was East Coast Fever (ECF) — a tick-borne disease common in Laikipia. While Boran cattle are resistant to tick bites, they aren’t immune to ECF. It was a painful discovery that passion alone couldn’t replace knowledge.
“Passion without science becomes a bit of a guessing game,” he reflects.
That experience — two trucks of promise reduced to one survivor — would become the foundation of Booran Ka’uu’s philosophy: structure, science, and systems must guide passion.
2. The Turning Point
“When you start formalizing a business,” Liban reflects,
“you learn a lot.”
Those losses became his teachers. The experience convinced him that he needed a calculated approach to delicately balance his deep, cultural affinity for rearing livestock with improving his knowledge to match the commercial realities.
“Livestock for us has always been labeled as culture,” he explains. “But it’s not culture — it’s a livelihood. When you get your meat, your milk from it— you need to quantify that as an economic product.”
That simple but powerful shift — from culture to commerce — marked the birth of Booran Ka’uu Farms.
3. Lessons from Abroad
A few years later, Liban’s outlook would be sharpened thousands of kilometres away — in Oman, through his export engagement with Al Bashayer Livestock Company.
“The international market demands 350 kilos live weight,” he recalls. “Many of the cows we were getting here were sub-300. In Oman, they have a station where they green-feed them to reach proper market weight. You start seeing the science.”
The revelation was immediate: competitiveness wasn’t about herd size; it was about systems. Nutrition, water, traceability — every detail was engineered for efficiency.
4. Building Structure at Home
Back in Kenya, Liban began applying those insights. On 65 acres near Nanyuki, he built a hybrid system — part feedlot, part strip-grazing — supported by irrigation, water tanks, and dams.
The aim was simple: resilience through structure.
“The more you open up this knowledge,” he says, “the easier it becomes to access quality primary sources.”
5. From Pain to Purpose
Today, Booran Ka’uu Farms stands as both enterprise and classroom — a place where failure’s lessons are turned into systems that others can learn from.
“In this business, there’s no shortcut,” Liban reminds us. “The lesson is always waiting — it just depends on how early you’re willing to learn it.”
From losing forty cows to building a farm that blends pastoral wisdom with modern science, Liban’s story is more than a business case. It’s proof that in every setback lies a seed — and when tended with humility and informed action, that seed can grow into a resilient enterprise.
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