Nairobi — A total of 4,287,713 farmers have been registered in the past five months in the ongoing farmers registration drive, data from the Agriculture and Interior Ministry shows.

The newly released data shows Rift Valley County leading with 1,241,482 farmers registered followed by Eastern region with 888,675.

Nyanza, Western, and Central Kenya have crossed the half-a-million mark, capturing the details of 663,438, 614,146, and 591,776 farmers respectively.

The Coast region has compiled a list of 235,779 farmers, while North Eastern (44,679) and Nairobi (6,738) closed the list with the lowest numbers so far

A total of 16 counties have filed a significantly high number of registered farmers, with all of them crossing the one hundred thousand mark.

Nakuru is currently the frontrunner in the exercise with a count of 230,787 farmers. Bungoma is second with 203,310, then followed closely by Kakamega, which has 203,173 farmers' details in its records.

Participation in the exercise is also high in Meru, where a total of 197,048 farmers have availed their personal information for registration.

Notably, some counties have relatively low numbers of registered farmers, with Isiolo, Mombasa, Marsabit, Wajir, Garissa recording well under ten thousand each.

However, the variation in progress is also attributable to other inflexible factors particularly the size and population of the county as well as its major socio-economic practices.

The government launched the voluntary exercise in January with the intent to establish a national database of all farmers, detailing their profiles, location, and crop acreage among other identifiers.

The move that has also facilitated the ongoing distribution of fertilizer