*All images are provided by the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology Research Team.
Most reports have always pointed to the fact that the main mango harvesting season in Kenya occurs between November and March, with a peak in January to February.
During our Producer Household Field Survey study, under the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Horticulture project titled “Determining the Trade-Offs between Short and Long Horticulture Value Chains in Kenya”, preliminary results indicate that there are unique and interesting variations in mango harvesting seasons. The mango harvesting season seems to have shifted occasioned by the recent climate variability and the frequency of extreme events, including the prolonged drought in 2021-2022, followed by heavy rains/El Nino in 2023, and, thereafter, another period of heavy rains in early 2024 within the mango growing regions.
According to farmers, Makueni County has traditionally had its mango harvesting season between November to February every year, with very few “off-season” fruits throughout the year. However, in Kilifi County this is not the case as there are two main mango seasons. The first mango season is between May and July while the second mango season is between December and January. The May-to-July season is usually the highest yielding but has lower quality mangoes, usually diseased and pest-infested because they form during the long rains, with relatively low use of agricultural inputs such as pesticides and fertilizers. With the recent climate change events, mango farmers in the country are currently uncertain on the precise mango harvesting season.
A notable predictor of the mango harvesting season in Kenya is the availability of rainfall whose pattern has changed due to the current climate changes. The extreme drought in 2021-2022 and the El Niño phenomenon in 2023 led to abortion of mango flowers, and, therefore, there was no clear peak harvesting season in 2022 and 2023. Due to flower abortion in late 2023, caused by the El Niño phenomenon, in Kilifi, mango trees flowered between March and April 2024 but were disrupted by the heavy rains that continued through April 2024. In July 2024, mangoes began flowering. However, the flowering was very irregular, in that, some mangoes within the same farm flowered while others didn’t.
Another phenomenon being observed is the increasing biennial bearing of mangoes, which happens when the cultivars produce high quantities in one year and scant or none in the following year.
On the brighter side, intermediaries in the mango value chain indicate that there are always fresh mangoes in specific parts of Kenya at any given time throughout the year, even though there are periods of glut in the specific main areas. Hence, they keep relocating their mango aggregation and collection centres depending on the mango harvest from one region to another. For instance, from Eastern Kenya (November-March) to Kilifi (May-July), Tana River and Garissa (July-November), Kerio Valley and West Pokot (September-October). This indicates availability of mangoes throughout the year, but in different volumes in the specific areas.
