Pasture farming for climate change adaptation in a semi-arid dryland in Kenya: status, challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Climate variability and change pose a major challenge to rain-fed agriculture in Africa. Extreme weather events are projected to continue affecting African drylands. Thus, it is essential to assess how rural farming communities in marginal environments are adapting to environmental changes. Specifically, there is need to assess local adaptations that can help enhance the resilience of socio-economic and environmental systems. This study identifies the current status, main challenges and opportunities of pasture farming for climate change adaptation among smallholder farmers in a semi-arid dryland in Kenya. It combines household and key informant interviews and participatory methods. Agropastoral farmers in the studied area are establishing native perennial pastures, where species selection is largely influenced by its forage value. Although agropastoral farmers have adopted pasture farming, they still face multiple challenges including climatic factors, lack of sufficient knowledge and information, limited access to markets, high cost and low availability of native grass seed, destruction of grazing herbivores and seed predation. Adopting strategies like low cost irrigation systems and agricultural technologies, cooperatives development and policy formulation to facilitate easy access of inputs and relevant markets has great potential to increase local resilience to environmental change and contribute to achieving wider development goals. Thus, policy makers should prioritize formulating climate adaptation policies and programmes that will promote diversification of livelihoods and support local climate adaptation strategies among farming communities in African drylands.