Farm Tours in Tanzania

What a farm tour in Tanzania actually is

A farm tour here is a walk through a smallholding with the person who works it, and it is one of the least packaged things a visitor can do in Tanzania. There is usually no visitor centre, no set route and no script. Someone shows you what is growing, explains why it is planted where it is, and answers questions, and the quality of the morning depends almost entirely on how curious you are.

What you will not generally see is agriculture at scale. Tanzanian farming is overwhelmingly smallholder, on plots often well under a hectare, and the interest is in how much is being made to happen on a small piece of ground rather than in machinery.

Most farm visits happen in three places: the southern slopes of Kilimanjaro around Moshi and Marangu, the hills around Arusha and Mount Meru, and the irrigated plots at Mto wa Mbu on the road below the Manyara escarpment. Coffee and tea have their own guides, under coffee tours and tea plantation tours. This one is about the farm itself.

The Chagga home garden

The thing most worth understanding on Kilimanjaro is that what looks like a patch of bananas with some coffee under it is one of the most studied agroforestry systems in Africa, and its numbers are genuinely surprising.

A peer-reviewed study of sixty-two Chagga coffee and banana plots on Kilimanjaro, working across more than fourteen hundred sample plots, recorded around five hundred and twenty vascular plant species. Over four hundred of those were not cultivated at all, and a hundred and ninety-four were forest species, persisting inside a farmed landscape.

That is the point of the system. The Chagga home garden is built in layers: tall trees for shade, timber and fodder; bananas beneath them; coffee under the bananas; and beans, yams, vegetables and medicinal plants at ground level, with livestock stall-fed on what is cut. Almost nothing is wasted, the canopy holds moisture on a steep slope, and the forest species that survive in it make the farms a genuine reservoir of biodiversity rather than a replacement for it.

It is also under pressure, and the study names the reasons: demand for wood, the shift to sun-tolerant coffee varieties that do not need the shade layer, and low coffee prices, which remove the incentive to keep the system as it is. A farm walk on the mountain is the clearest way to see all of that at once, and it is worth asking your host what has changed on their own plot in twenty years.

Bananas, and why there are eighteen of them

The single best question to ask on a Kilimanjaro farm is what kind of banana you are looking at, because the answer is never just banana.

Research on the region documents eighteen distinct banana varieties, each with its own use. Some are for cooking, and mchare is the favourite for that. Some are for brewing, and ndishi is the brewing banana, which by the researchers' own account tastes bad if you try to eat it. Others are for roasting, for eating ripe, for fodder, or for their leaves and fibre.

Visitors routinely assume the sweet yellow banana they know is the crop and everything else is a lesser version of it. The reverse is closer to the truth: the eating banana is one specialised use among many, and on a Chagga farm the brewing and cooking varieties matter more. The leaves wrap food and thatch, the stems feed cattle, the fibre ties things, and the fruit does four different jobs depending on which plant it came from.

The brewing varieties feed into mbege, the banana beer of the Chagga and the Meru, which is made from a banana component supplying the yeast and germinated finger millet supplying the sugar. It is covered as a drink under food and market tours; on the farm, what you will see is the plant it starts from.

One small correction worth having, because popular sources get it wrong: the tree called msesewe, which turns up in accounts of Chagga farming and brewing, is Rauvolfia caffra, not Rhamnus prinoides.

Farms on the northern circuit

Mto wa Mbu, between Lake Manyara and the Ngorongoro road, is where most safari travellers see a farm, because it sits directly on the route. The village grows bananas on irrigated plots, along with rice, maize and vegetables, and the walk usually takes in the water channels, several banana varieties, a rice plot and a craft workshop. The irrigation is the interesting part and also the part hardest to pin down: the enterprise there refers to an irrigation project, but no detailed description of the system could be independently confirmed, so treat what you are told about its history as local account rather than documented fact. The enterprise that runs the visits, and what could and could not be confirmed about it, is covered under village tours.

The hills around Arusha and Mount Meru, at Ilkiding'a, Ng'iresi, Mulala and Tengeru, are the other established farm-visit area, with coffee, bananas, vegetables and dairy on steep smallholdings. Of the enterprises there, some could be confirmed as currently operating and some could not, which is covered under village tours. Ask for a named village and a named contact rather than accepting a general description.

Around Lushoto in the Usambaras the farming is vegetables, fruit and dairy on terraced hillsides, and the walking between farms is as good a reason to go as the farms.

On money: where a village development fee is collected, no independent source documents who receives it or how it is spent, and at least one enterprise's own published figures are internally inconsistent. It is a fair thing to ask about on the day, and a specific answer naming what the fee has paid for is a better sign than a general one.

Beekeeping, and the visitor product that does not exist

Tanzania is one of Africa's great honey producers and almost no visitor ever sees it, for a straightforward reason: there is essentially no beekeeping tourism.

The scale is substantial. In 2021 the country produced around thirty-one thousand tonnes of honey and nearly two thousand tonnes of beeswax, placing it second in Africa, from something like nine million colonies. The industry is governed by a national beekeeping policy dating from 1998 and an Act of 2002, and the forest service manages nine bee reserves.

The character of it is what makes it interesting. Around ninety per cent of Tanzanian hives are traditional log and bark hives, roughly one and a half million of them, against some twenty-three thousand modern improved hives. Most of that production comes from the miombo woodland of the western and central regions, Tabora above all, where hives are hung in trees across huge areas of woodland and the honey is a forest product rather than a farm one. The FAO estimates the country's potential at well over four times current output.

Despite all of that, no beekeeping tour or honey cooperative open to visitors could be confirmed anywhere in Tanzania. Beekeeping appears in district council material as an activity with tourism potential, and one district explicitly names it as something being developed, but a traveller cannot currently turn up and be shown round.

One thing is changing. Arusha is due to host the fiftieth Apimondia Congress, the world beekeeping congress, in September 2027, which is the first time the event has come to Tanzania and is a reasonable sign that the sector is being taken more seriously as a visitor proposition than it has been.

In the meantime, what you can do is buy the honey, which is widely sold and often very good, and ask where it came from. Miombo honey from the western woodlands is a different product from the honey produced around farms, and a seller who knows which is which is worth buying from. If beekeeping genuinely interests you, ask an operator to arrange a visit to a beekeeper directly rather than looking for a product, and expect it to be an arrangement rather than a booking.

Visiting a working farm

• Ask what has changed. The most interesting conversation on any Tanzanian farm is about the last twenty years: which crops have been dropped, what the weather is doing, what the children are going to do.
• Wear boots and long trousers. Farm paths are steep, muddy and full of things that scratch.
• Ask before photographing people or their houses. A homestead is not a landscape.
• Accept the food. Refusing what is offered is the commonest way visitors cause offence without noticing.
• Buy something at the gate — honey, coffee, bananas, dried fruit. It is the most direct transaction available.
• Do not hand sweets or money to children. It creates the dynamic that spoils these visits for everyone who comes afterwards.
• Allow half a day. An hour buys a tour; half a day buys a conversation.

Questions travellers ask