Adoption of Conservation Agriculture in Eastern Kenya: Identified and Measured Indicators of the Sustainability of the C.A Practices

Abstract

Conservation agriculture (CA) is fronted as the solution to sub Saharan Africa food insecurity problems in light of climate change. Sustainability of agricultural landscapes has become a primary issue for policy-makers and land managers at different hierarchical levels including farmers, advisors, policy-makers, and scientists as reflected in many of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs focus on ending poverty, protecting the planet, and ensuring prosperity for all, as part of the new sustainable development agenda initiated in 2015 to precede the Millennium development goals. With the recognition that Sustainability assessment needs to move from global and regional scale to local scales to enable people measure their progress towards sustainability, a conceptual model guides the sustainability assessment approach adopted for this study. The AESIS framework is adopted for indicator selection and representation. This study sought to evaluate the agro-environmental and socio economic sustainability of Conservation Agriculture as practiced in Kenya. Results show that 8 out of 24 indicators performances are rated as best, 5 indicators performances are rated as good, 4 indicators performances are rated as moderate while 7 indicators performances are rated as either unacceptable or limited forming a basis for the points of improvement in agro-ecosystems under conservation agriculture.