Climate Resilience Farming: What Smallholders Are Teaching Us

28 Sept 2025

Across Elgeyo Marakwet's escarpments and valleys, it is often the smallest farms that hold the clearest lessons in resilience. Long before climate resilience became a technical term, smallholder farmers were already adapting, diversifying crops, reading rainfall patterns, and shaping their land to withstand a season that might not go as planned.

Diversity as a safety net

Where a single crop can fail with a poor rainy season, a mixed compound rarely fails completely. Farmers along the Spencer Line have long paired avocado and coffee with passion fruit, vegetables, and indigenous trees, a form of agroforestry that spreads risk across the calendar and across the market. When one crop struggles, another often carries the household through.

Sharing what works

Champion farmers play a quiet but critical role in this adaptation. One farmer's success with a coffee nursery or a new fruit variety rarely stays contained to a single compound; cuttings, seedlings, and advice pass from neighbour to neighbour, turning individual experimentation into a shared, community-wide practice.

Working with the land, not against it

Assisted Natural Regeneration and similar practices reflect the same instinct at a landscape scale: rather than imposing a fixed plan on degraded land, they work with what the soil and existing vegetation can already offer, allowing native trees to recover and stabilise the ground around farms and waterways.

As formal climate resilience strategies are developed at the county and national level, smallholders offer a useful reminder: adaptation is rarely a single intervention. It is built, season by season, from diversity, shared knowledge, and a close working relationship with the land.