P.O Box 10375 - 00100, Nairobi Kenya, Tel: +254 20 4444252, Fax: +254 20 4451391

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The project envisaged to help increase household food security and to enhance smallholder farmers’ resilience to effects of climate change by adopting profitable good agricultural practises. The key activities included: capacity building at all levels (training), establishment and formation of farmers groups, establishment of conservation agriculture demonstration plots along the selected value chain, supporting farmers adoption and adaptation of conservation agriculture, conducting farmers to farmers exchange visits, conducting farmers field day exhibition and holding regular district stakeholders forum. The expected output included: promotion of adoption of sustainable agricultural practises, awareness creation, sharing and dissemination of information on sustainable agriculture, and strengthening capacity of network dedicated to the promotion of good agricultural practises in the country.

Baraka Agricultural College undertook the following project activities within agreed budget, indicators and deliverables under specific tasks which include: Stakeholders mobilization, Establishment of farmer demo sites, Technical field backstopping of groups/capacity building, and Farmer field days and farmers to farmer exchange visits. These activities were supposed to support the above project entitled, ``Scaling up sustainable agricultural practices for small-holder farmers in western Kenya’’, in Molo district. The larger Molo District has since been subdivided into Molo, Kuresoi and Njoro District. The project has of 50 farmers groups thus achieving the targeted total of 50 groups in the region .The attainment of this number of groups was expected to maximize the number of farmers exposed to the CA technology and hence increase the uptake and adoption of the technology. There are 26 trained ToTs in the Molo region actively involved in implementation of the project. The fifty groups have one acre each of demonstration plot, the initial five groups have continued to act as reference groups. These groups include: Mburi, FADCE Kamara, Tajimu, Highland and Baraka Shalom women group.

The Molo region has continued to experience unprecedented erratic rains and very high temperatures during the day. That means farmers should have planted immediately they controlled the weeds and await the rains as it supply is not uniform for whole region. That should also apply to cover-crops as the rains have proved to be unreliable. Supply of inputs and equipments had been fast tracked to ensure the demonstration plots could be planted during the dry period prior to the long rains which had been expected in the Month of April-May. All the groups have planted and farmers are carrying out the season long experiments meant to help them internalize what they had learned when they were taught basic CA principles by the respective ToT and other resource persons involved in the training

Concluding remarks

Conservation agriculture is an alternative to conventional agriculture and is founded on three principles: permanent soil cover; minimum or no mechanical soil disturbance; crop rotations and or associations. The functions of conservation agriculture include: conserve the soil; soil moisture retention; improve the soil’s productivity; reduce machinery costs and reduces labour input. The advantages of conservation agriculture include: increases organic matter; increases soil water content; improves soil structure; increases crop yields; allows more time off for other activities and more cost –effective.

Due to the foregoing, the project on up scaling of Conservation Agriculture in Molo region is timely and should be replicated by training of a further 50 groups so as to increase the number of farmers exposed to the technology of Conservation Agriculture. This would accelerate the adoption and uptake of CA in the entire Molo region.