Survey on Current Status, Challenges and Opportunities towards Integration of Traditional Smallholder Crop-livestock Systems in Kenya

Abstract

The current study reports the results of a baseline survey conducted to establish current status of optimizing productivity of crop-livestock systems in Kenya. Results from the study showed that 74% and 18% of the household head and respondents were male and female respectively, indicating a male dominance of household headship. The household head (69%) and respondents (16%) reported to have completed classes for formal school. On average, farmers were walking 1.83 Km, 5.18 Km, 4.65 Km, and 12.79 Km to the nearest village market, town market, extension office and farmers’ training centers respectively. This shows that extension and communication services are still far apart from the farming communities, with a negative implication on technology adoption and household food and nutrition security. Majority of the farmers did not utilize organic nutrients for crop production (96%). Open heaping/piling, composting with other materials, use of solid and liquid manures was reported to be utilized on average 67 kg, 30 kg, 11 kg and 2 kg respectively. This implies a poor manure management, low adoption and utilization levels of organic manures, with subsequent impact on climate change, crop productivity and household food and nutrition security. The main constraint limiting the use of organic fertilizers were ranked as follows; ignorance of the technical aspects linked to the use of manure as an organic fertilizer (17.8%), low awareness of manure usefulness to improve soil fertility (16.4%), high affordability and timely accessibility of chemical fertilizers (16.3%). Results further show that majority of the respondent did not utilize Nitrogen fixing plants (66%), nutrient cycling (84%) and legume crops (75%). The main Nitrogen-fixing plants were faba bean (10%), Sesbania (9%), cowpea (5%), alfalfa (2%) and sunflower (1%) respectively. The survey recommends promotion of climate smart interventions and organic soil fertility management approaches, farmers capacity building and promotion of agribusiness.