Climate-Smart Agriculture Practices and Small-scale Farmers’ Income: The Case of Maize Farmers in Trans-Nzoia County, Kenya

Abstract

Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) is one of the resolutions that addresses the issues of climate change adaptation, mitigation and income of farmers. This study evaluated the adoption of CSA practices and the income of small-scale farmers in Trans-Nzoia County. A well-developed questionnaire was used to collect data. Multiple regression and descriptive statistics were applied to analyse the data collected from 119 randomly selected sample households. Findings revealed that the practices were at great extent, averagely, fairly, and poorly adopted by the farmers. Adoption of practices including water conservation structures, water harvesting, minimum tillage, integrated soil fertility management, agroforestry, drought tolerant crop varieties, timely planting, use of organic fertilizers, crop rotation, early maturing varieties and practice of irrigation were significant at 5% level of significance influence the income of small-scale farmers. This study therefore recommends that continuous promotion of climate-smart agriculture practices is important to increase farmers’ productivity and therefore income increase. Strategies should be developed so that farmers’ level of adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices increases so as to boost productivity and therefore increase the income of the farmers. Training farmers on the benefits of adoption of CSA practices while also subsidizing farm inputs like agro-chemicals and fertilizers can boost the adoption rate of CSA practices, resulting in high farm income.