Feeding cattle under suboptimal conditions in Kenya: From emphasising technical (non-)adoption to stimulating adaptive performance

Abstract

In the climate-development interface, research for development gained a strong interest in climate-smart agriculture and sustainable forms of intensification. Moreover, the urgency to respond to climate change stimulates a strong and sometimes exclusive focus on mitigation, driven by research-based agricultural practices. In the livestock sector, this materialises in strategies to lower emissions from livestock, which centralises the adoption question: what can we do to stimulate the use of best practices by smallholder farmers? This paper flags the risk that this outlook may overlooksmallholder farmers' capacities to navigate sub-optimal conditions of drought or scarcity. The paper applies an alternative lens for understanding ‘agriculture-as-performance’ and highlights smallholder cattle owners’ agency and resourcefulness. It aims to create a conceptual space to examine how adaptive capacities are grounded in the rhythms of agriculture under suboptimal conditions. Empirically, the study focuses on the cattle-feeding practices of five farming households evolving through seasons and lifetimes in a sedentary agricultural system in Kenya. Our frame identifies diverse affordances, conceptualised as opportunities for actions, emerging and disappearing in the immediate material environment, and we portray cattle feeding as a networked response anchored in practices of giving, sharing, and receiving. We use our insights into the dynamics and performance of entangled socio-technical practices to sketch the contours of an alternative pathway for agriculture for development. We argue in favour of a shift from an exclusive focus on the adoption of predefined optimal solutions to a diagnostic and catalytic approach integrating situated adaptive performances through which farming households respond to action opportunities.

Keywords

Dairy East Africa low emission development livestock mitigation adaptation smallholder skills practices

Introduction

Sustainably intensifying smallholder farming practices is central to initiatives at the climate-development interface in low and middle-income countries (Rockström et al., 2017). These initiatives have the potential to integrate two key components of responding to climate change: mitigation and adaptation. However, marrying both perspectives is not easy. Mitigation implies a radical transformation of current practices, which may dismiss situated capacities to navigate and adapt to climate change conditions. Addressing this paradoxical situation requires balancing and connecting both logics. However, a strong and often exclusive emphasis on mitigation-oriented agricultural intensification practices, usually designed for optimal conditions (Kuyah et al., 2021; Makate et al., 2019; Mwangi and Kariuki, 2015), hampers this balancing act. Therefore, we aim to open conceptual space for integrating adaptation capacities in the climate-development interface.

We embed our search for navigating the paradox between mitigation and adaptation in the livestock sector in East Africa, and particularly the dairy sector in Kenya. The livestock sector is one of the strategic sectors in which Kenya aims to deliver on its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to the Paris Agreement. Besides concerns about the effects of droughts on pastoralists, this policy outlook targets increased productivity in the livestock sector through the implementation of climate-smart actions (Government of the Republic of Kenya, 2018). In the dairy sector, climate-smart actions are primarily associated with reducing emissions and intensification strategies based on feed quality and availability, manure management and animal husbandry (Ericksen and Crane, 2018; Khatri-Chhetri et al., 2020; Paul et al., 2020). This outlook reinforces a research focus on assessing barriers and incentives for diffusing designed and optimised intensification practices (Brandt et al., 2020; Bosire et al., 2016; Hawkins et al., 2021, 2022). Our concern is what this implies for embedded capacities to adapt to changing conditions in a sector in Kenya that has been an important source of food, income, employment, and provides a safety net for the resource-poor (Herrero et al., 2013). Therefore, we turn around the research gaze and start our inquiry from the evolving and intertwined practices of cow owners who continuously navigate complex, changing conditions in drought-prone areas in Kenya.

Conceptually, we build on approaches (Glover et al., 2016, 2019; Obeng Adomaa et al., 2022) critical of how technology diffusion frameworks portray technical change as a matter of adoption (e.g. Lybbert and Sumner, 2012, Moerkerken et al., 2020; Waaswa et al., 2022). We give primacy to how smallholder farmers perform agriculture (Crane et al., 2011; Richards, 1989) and are able to sustain their entangled practices in the context of climate variability (Vernooij et al., 2024). This entails focussing on real-life practices embedded in dynamic livestock systems, which are typically characterised by suboptimal and changing conditions. Agriculture as performance is visible in how smallholder farmers operate under conditions of resource constraints, weather fluctuations and socio-economic vulnerabilities (Bosire et al., 2019; Wetende et al., 2018). Looking at agriculture as performance draws attention to the ability to perform a plan while simultaneously being able to respond, adjust and improvise according to changes affecting the plan. Our integrative approach to agriculture as performance interweaves social and technical processes that can span ‘… time frames from the momentary to the life-time …’ (Crane et al., 2011: 180). A temporal lens attends to fluctuating affordances in feeding practices and recognises cattle owners, attuned to what is available and with an eye on the future. This conceptualisation draws attention to the different manifestations of smallholder agencies over time.

The paper uses this conceptual frame for analysing the practices to provide cows with feed for five rural households in an area affected by climate-induced droughts and a maize (cattle feed) disease. Our empirical focus is on everyday practices of providing feed to cows. Cows are essential to rural Kenyan households for monetary and non-monetary factors, including milk sale income, milk provision for children, and social status (Ouma et al., 2003). Most dairy cattle in East Africa are kept in diversified crop-livestock systems in combination with other on-farm and off-farm activities (Acosta et al., 2021). When a cow dies, part of the livelihood strategy disappears, potentially intensifying household vulnerability. In situations of climate change and/or pressure, rural households anticipate the need to sustain themselves and cow survival, making cattle feeding essential to adaptation strategies (Ericksen and Crane, 2018). Our descriptive accounts, informed by technography (Jansen and Vellema, 2011), centre on the various ways in which cow owners integrate short and long-term perspectives to ensure cows are fed. We start from situated actions for an ex-ante appraisal of adaptive performances and refrain from focussing on interventions and the related technology adoption question. The analysis detects adaptive capacities to perform agriculture under suboptimal, changing conditions, with the aim to make these an integral element of the climate-development interface.

Below, we elaborate on our conceptual framing to study agriculture as performance and introduce our methods. The results section details long and short-term adaptive feed management strategies of five households. Finally, we discuss the implications of our approach for advancing a diagnostic and catalytic ex-ante programme of agricultural research for development, attuned to how rural households navigate the rhythms of agriculture and livelihoods.

Conceptual framing of adaptive performance

This section outlines three conceptual implications of studying agriculture as an adaptive performance, namely: (1) integrating timespans entangled in evolving processes of socio-technical change; (2) identifying how cow owners recognise and use affordances emerging in practices and networks; and (3) considering agriculture as a constantly (re)configured repertoire of practices.

Studying agriculture as a performance involves integrating time horizons for understanding socio-technical change. Conceptualising smallholder agricultural innovation as ‘performance’ was introduced by Richards (1989). Referring to tools, techniques, knowledge, and skills in situated actions, ‘performance’ highlights human capacities and know-how for practical ends (Jansen and Vellema, 2011). A performance lens resonates with analysing unfolding responses to climate change and climatic variability, because, as Crane et al. argue ‘… it highlights how adaptive processes and technologies, whether short or long term, are more than simple technical responses to biophysical conditions’ (2011: 179). A performance lens understands agriculture as a result of human agency and social networks in historical and ecological contexts: smallholders have agency through practice.

We analyse how cow owners cope by mastering variable skills to attune practical daily activities to intrinsic properties of materials, things and beings associated with feeding cattle. We build on ecological anthropologist Ingold's conceptualisation of affordances, anchored in Gibson's approach to perception and action. Ingold (2022) sees affordances as openings or hindrances, only present in situated actions, and made and remade (Glover, 2022). An affordance lens exposes how artefacts, materials or networks co-shape situated practices of keeping livestock. Tools or materials are not fixed but put into use. How these are put into use depends not only on physical strength and soil quality but also cultural elements influencing and informing the day(s) or times the tool is (not) used. We relate this to how socio-economic positions condition access to additional information or collaborations that influence the use of tools and materials. For studying performance, the concept of affordances (Glover, 2022; Smith et al., 2021) relates outcomes, such as consistent feeding, to opportunities for action in human and non-human surroundings anticipated by smallholders. Therefore, affordances and adaptive performance are coupled.

Third, we understand adaptive performance as a situated configuration of practices. Here, diverse affordances of similar tools or materials are visible in site or household-specific configurations (Glover et al., 2017). To understand opportunities for action, we unravel household-level practices. Performance cannot be understood by looking at a single practice, such as feeding, in isolation. Rather, household-level decision-making creates connections among distinct practices. We approach performance as an empirical configuration of multiple practices, which changes over time, in line with seasonal or lifetime fluctuations. Our integrative perspective sees socio-technical practices as integral parts of a web of practices with short and longer-term orientations. A configurational perspective looks at what combinations work, and when, and searches for processes that (re)configure practices as adaptive responses to changing conditions.

Methods

The research area

This study was conducted in a sedentary agricultural area, Chepalungu Subcounty in the south of Bomet County (Figure 1). In recent decades, the region has experienced climate zone characteristic shifts: temperature increases and changing precipitation patterns (Lawrence et al., 2023a), affecting the climatic suitability of agropastoral farming systems (Lawrence et al., 2023b), and others. Typically, there are two rainy and two dry seasons throughout the year, starting with a dry period from January to mid-March, then rains until May, another drier period until October, and rains in November and December (The County Government of Bomet, 2022). The area was further affected by the Maize Lethal Necrotic Disease (MLND), first reported in 2011, resulting in total yield losses (Kiruwa et al., 2016) for about ten years. Maize is the region's main staple crop and an important cattle feed ingredient. The changing climatic conditions and MLND generate suboptimal feeding conditions. Dairy is an important livelihood activity, predominantly kept in mixed crop-livestock systems (The County Government of Bomet, 2022). In 2019, 124,306 households kept livestock; 60% of farmers can be classified as subsistence livestock and 40% as commercial (Ministry of Agriculture & Livestock Development, 2019).

Figure 1.

The research area is in Kenya (left), drawing on data from households in three villages in Chepalungu Subcounty in Bomet County (right).

Data collection and analysis

Data collection focused on long and short-term changes in cattle feeding practices. Based on earlier survey work,¹ five households with diverse cattle-feeding practices were involved in documenting practices and assets (Table 1). All – Jackie, Loraine, John & Maria, Faith, Daniel & Gloria,² or three widowed women and two male-headed households – experienced prolonged dry periods (a dry season followed by a weak rainy season) and MLND. Data were collected between October and December 2019. Loraine and Faith resided in Village 1, Daniel & Gloria in Village 2, and Jackie and John & Maria in Village 3 (Figure 1). In as much as five households can be typified, from Vernooij et al. (2024), we learn that female-headed household heads are more represented in vulnerable farmer groups.

Table 1.

Available land and livestock of Bomet County, Chepalungu Subcounty and the included households in this study.

Available land and livestock^a	Plot size (acres) [SD]	Arable land (acres) [SD]	Cattle number [SD]	Number of cows [SD]
Bomet County (N = 341)	4.27 [4.67]	3.98 [4.36]	4.65 [2.94]	2.16 [1.35]
Chepalungu Subcounty (N = 69)	3.96 [3.74]	3.49 [3.51]	4.86 [3.29]	2.32 [1.56]
Included households (N = 5)	4.43 [5.26]	4.33 [5.04]	3.2 [1.79]	1 [0]

Descriptive statistics from a household survey conducted by the first and last author in late 2017.

Life histories were the data collection starting point, specifically key life events (i.e. marriage or migration) and the accumulation and fluctuation in key dairy production assets, namely cows and land. Life histories commenced the year the respondent married their (late) spouses (Table 2). Next, interviews and participant observation in farm activities mapped configurations of feeding practices during the short rainy season from October to December 2019. Feeding practices during a recent severe dry season were recalled via interviews describing respondents’ chosen year and season. Initial data collection and analysis took place iteratively; multiple visits allowed for intermittent analysis related to understanding the households’ cattle feeding practices. Additionally, data interpretation was informed by 25 interviews with government officials, hay brokers, agro-vet stores, financial input providers and dairy cooperative societies in the research area (see de Koeijer, 2020). The dairy practices are part of a broader agricultural and livelihood portfolio of activities – for more details about other livelihood activities in addition to key sources of income (Table 2) we refer to de Koeijer (2020).

Table 2.

Birth year and period covered during life history interviews.

Household life histories	Jackie	Lorraine	John & Maria	Faith	Daniel & Gloria
Birth year	1958	1985	1956 (John)	1972	1972 (Daniel)
The time period covered in life history interviews^a	1977–2019	2001–2019	1980–2019	1989–2019	2005^b–2019
Key sources of household income	Formal income from daughter	Agricultural sales, specifically sweet potato and onions	Agricultural sales, maize mill, and (until recent retirement) formal income from John	Agricultural sales	Formal income from both Daniel & Gloria

Year of marriage with (late) spouses was the starting point for the life history interviews.

Daniel & Gloria were married in 2006. In 2005, Daniel purchased 1 cow and 0.9 acres of land; hence, this is the start moment for the life history interview.

Results

The results section presents adaptive responses over time and describes how households navigated access to dairy production assets. It next elaborates on the configurations of practices in the wet season and during the (prolonged) dry season.

Navigating access to production assets

Access to land and cattle was key and shaped the longer-term conditions of cattle feeding practices. Life history interviews revealed links between key events (e.g. marriage and migration) to production assets. Network linkages proved important for households navigating access to production assets. Jackie reported initially having 10 acres of land upon marriage, while her father-in-law had not subdivided the land. This changed when he subdivided his land among his five sons and sold another five acres. John and Maria reported the opposite: due to subdivision, their share increased. Faith, Lorraine, and, after her husband's death, also Jackie, were able to rent additional agricultural plots when without sufficient access to land in (family) ownership. Life histories indicated fluctuation in the number of cows owned and access to (rented) land as conditions for feeding livestock. Increases in (rented) land and cows were primarily due to the subdivision of land, purchasing cows and breeding cattle. Table 3 summarises reported reasons for reduced amounts of cows and (rented) land. Cow numbers decreased due to drought, disease, dowry payments, medical bills, school fees and migration. (Rented) land did not reduce, or it was reduced due to subdivision and migration.

Table 3.

Households’ fluctuating production assets and migration.

Households fluctuating production assets and migration	Jackie	Lorraine	John & Maria	Faith	Daniel & Gloria
Lowest to highest reported amount of cattle (number)	0–9	0–1	4–12	0–3	0–5
Reported events that reduced the number of cattle	Drought, disease, medical bills, school fees	Cow sold by (late) husband	Subdivision of cows by John's father, dowry	School fees	Moving his farm, selling all cattle and purchasing new
Lowest to highest reported amount of (owned/rented) land (acres)^a	1–10 (owned), 1–1.5 (rented)	0.2–1 (owned), 0.5–1 (rented)	4–15 (owned)	0.4–1.5 (owned), 0.6–1.1 (rented)	0.9–3 (owned)
Reported events that reduced size of (rented) land	Subdivision by in-laws	Rented land fluctuated	Only increased, via purchasing	Migration back home from another region	Moving his farm, selling all land and purchasing new
History of (cattle/household) migration	Yes (cattle + household)	Yes (cattle)	Yes (cattle)	Yes (only Faith)	No (but moved farm)

It was sometimes difficult to establish the number of cattle and land owned by households because land and cattle amounts were often expressed as owned by the larger household, including parents, in-laws and/or children.

Relevant to feeding cattle is that, previously, households and/or their cattle migrated during (prolonged) dry periods, as reported by respondents from the 1990s and 2000s. During the early 1990s, Jackie stayed with family members near Mau Forest, where their single cow could graze. When Lorraine and her husband were unable to feed their cow during a dry season in 2006, they also moved the cow close to the Mau Forest where relatives cared for the animal. John and his brothers’ cows temporarily migrated to communal land along the border with Kisii County as a response to severe drought in 1992. Faith and her husband wished to (permanently) migrate to ‘… a more productive area with a better climate’, but they had no money or place to migrate to until, in 1995, a neighbour migrated elsewhere. Faith (temporarily) followed, shortly after her neighbour introduced her to the area. In recent years, temporary migration of cattle and households has been less common. John explains: ‘You cannot migrate anymore. People only have land for their own cows’. For Lorraine, migration is not preferred: when the cow migrates, her children lack milk.

These stories show the importance of household networks. Similar narratives emerged regarding access to (rented) land and borrowed cows. Jackie rented from a relative but lost access in 2012. That same year, she rented from a friend's husband. During months with limited rainfall, the land was free. When there was rainfall and grass growth, the price could rise to 1000 KES (US$9.87 in 2019) monthly. Lorraine and her late husband borrowed a cow from a friend after her husband had sold theirs. According to Lorraine, borrowing a cow is common for households with young children and no cows. They borrowed the cow for 7 years until Lorraine could purchase her own.

This section showed how households navigate access to production assets and which events cause fluctuations in production assets. Considering navigating access to production assets as a prerequisite for being able to practice cattle feeding, the importance of networks is key. The next sections detail practice configurations for included households.

Cattle feeding practices in the wet season

This section presents cattle feeding practice configurations during the short rainy season (October–December 2019). Households combined food crop residues, meal leftovers, fodder crops and other feed sources entering or leaving the farm via purchasing or trade, or for free (Table 4). Variable feeding practices suggest that each household realised different affordances.

Table 4.

Sources and types of cattle feed per household (wet season, October–December 2019).

Cattle feed	Feed source^a (2019)	October	November	December
Jackie	Farm	Maize stalks, pasture, fresh Napier, sweet potato vines, sorghum stems		Pasture
Jackie	Off-farm	Mineral salts (purchased), pasture (friendly price)
Lorraine	Farm	Pasture, sugar cane, maize stalks, pumpkin leaves, banana leaves and trunks, weeds		Maize stalks
Lorraine	Off-farm	Maize meal, mineral salts (purchased), Boma Rhodes (exchange)		Mineral salts (purchased)
John & Maria	Farm	Maize stalks, Boma Rhodes hay, Napier grass, sweet potato vines		Pasture, Boma Rhodes hay
John & Maria	Off-farm	Nothing
Faith	Farm	Pasture, Napier grass, sweet potato vines, maize stalks, calliandra tree leaves		Pasture
Faith	Off-farm	Mineral salts (purchased), pasture (free)
Daniel & Gloria	Farm	Napier grass	Pasture, Napier grass	Pasture
Daniel & Gloria	Off-farm	Maize stalks, mineral salts (purchased), forest grazing (fee)		Mineral salts (purchased)

In addition to feed sources from the farms, all households fed crop residues (when harvested and available), and meal leftovers.

In addition to grazing on a rented field, Jackie's cows fed on maize stalks, Napier grass, sweet potato vines, sorghum stems, family leftovers (e.g. potato peels and chewed sugarcane) even mineral salts from the agrovet. When the rain became heavy, the grazing grass fed the cows sufficiently while additional feeding stopped.

During the wet season, Lorraine mainly fed her cows sugar cane, in addition to grazing on 0.2 acres. When dairy meal, a concentrate feed, ran out, she shifted to 0.5 kg of (typically only for human consumption) maize meal. Feed quantity and type depended on farming activities and household meals and included weeds, maize stalks, pumpkin leaves and leaves and trunks of banana trees. Lorraine received Boma Rhodes grass in return for helping another; she also received maize stalks and sweet potato vines from others. After harvesting maize, she replanted quickly because predicted heavy rains could spoil ripened maize and complicate planting. Thereafter, she fed the cow with maize stalks for a few weeks – a long period for a single feed ingredient.

John & Maria produced and stored hay from their Boma Rhodes grass, which they fed their cattle after finishing an earlier harvest's maize stalks. They added Napier grass and sweet potato vines for lactating cows. The pasture provided little grass at the beginning of the short rainy season. They only provided dairy meals and molasses to cows that just calved and gave much milk. After the rainfall peaked, grass grew faster, and cows required less feeding. They only gave Boma Rhodes hay to lactating cows. There were no crop residues to feed – the harvesting season was over.

Faith's cow grazed at her brother-in-law's pasture. At the beginning of the short rains, the cow was dry and had to calve in 3 months. The cow was fed with Napier grass (when no crops were harvested) or sweet potato vines, maize stalks, and other crop residues (when crops were harvested). She did not harvest sugar cane, saving it for calving, to boost milk production. Since the cow produced no milk at the time, she traded Napier grass with neighbours for milk. She had her tree nursery and utilised Calliandra tree leaves every fortnight. Additional feeding stopped as heavy rains commenced and Napier grass rose in moisture, reducing the benefits of feeds over pasture.

Daniel & Gloria fed five (four lactating) cows and three calves with purchased maize stalks because natural grass was unavailable to start the rainy season. Additionally, their cows grazed in the forest while calves remained at home. With maize stalks depleted, Daniel wished to purchase difficult-to-find Boma Rhodes hay and the cows continued grazing in the forest. Additionally, he cut Napier grass in the morning and fed it in the afternoon for moisture to evaporate. The natural pasture increased as the rainy season proceeded.

All households balanced pasture with additional feeding. In the wet season, they anticipated availability and used affordances of fodder, crop residues and other feed ingredients. Feeding cows involved quick and sometimes improvised decision-making attuned to cow reproductive cycles and rain prediction.

Cattle feeding practices in a (prolonged) dry season

Cattle feeding practices represent situated performance. This section portrays emerging feeding practices in a recently experienced severe dry period in 2017 or 2018. For Jackie and Daniel & Gloria, a failing wet season followed a dry 2017. Table 5 summarises the source and type of feed, resulting in diverse feeding configurations.

Table 5.

Sources and types of cattle feed per household (dry season, January–April–May, either in 2017 or 2018, with two households experiencing a failed wet season until October 2017).

Cattle feed	Feed source^a	January	February	March	April	May	June	August	September
Jackie (2017)	Farm	Sorghum stems, failed maize & beans harvest, Napier grass			Tree leaves			Tree leaves, failed maize & beans harvest	Tree leaves, failed maize & beans harvest, sugar cane stems
Jackie (2017)	Off-farm	Pasture (rented land), mineral salts (purchased)			Napier grass, cut grass, tree leaves, Boma Rhodes grass (free), mineral salts (purchased)			Hay, mineral salts (purchased)
Lorraine (2018)	Farm	Pasture, sugar cane		Maize stalks		N/A
Lorraine (2018)	Off-farm	Mineral salts (purchased)	Cut grass, tree leaves (free or at friendly price), hay, mineral salts (purchased)			N/A
John and Maria (2018)	Farm	Hay, Napier grass			Maize and beans, tree leaves		N/A
John and Maria (2018)	Off-farm	Nothing			Dairy meal, molasses, hay (purchased)		N/A
Faith (2017)	Farm	Cut grass, Napier grass	Banana trunk and leaves, beans, sugar cane	Banana trunk, sugar cane	Sugar cane, failed maize harvest		N/A
Faith (2017)	Off-farm	Pasture (free), mineral salts (purchased)		Mineral salts (purchased)		Maize stalks (friendly price), mineral salts (purchased)	N/A
Daniel and Gloria (2017)	Farm	Pasture, Napier grass		Failed maize & beans harvest			Nothing
Daniel and Gloria (2017)	Off-farm	Forest grazing (fee), mineral salts (purchased)		Boma Rhodes hay, sugar cane, mineral salts (purchased)

In addition to feed sources from the farms, all households feed (other) crop residues (when harvested and available), and meal leftovers.

Jackie's cows grazed on rented pasture and were fed sorghum stems and a failed maize and bean intercrop harvest in the first months of 2017's dry season. After three months, natural grass and Napier grass were finished and dried out. From April, Jackie combined scarce free feed sources: tree leaves, Napier grass from her sisters and grass cut on the land of family and neighbours. During light, inconsistent rains in June, she planted 0.5 acres of maize and beans, but the crops failed, and she fed cattle with uprooted plants in August and September. Then, she had to purchase two bales of hay per 2 days, which was more than 2 L of milk could cover. In September, she fed leaves and sugar cane stems. Proper rains started in late October.

Lorraine let her cows graze on a small pasture and fed sugar cane to start 2018's dry season. Soon, she had to source feed elsewhere – sugar cane and crop residues were insufficient. She cut native grass and tree leaves along neighbour and family fences, for free or a small fee; sometimes her cow grazed along the fences. Occasionally, she purchased hay from a broker. In March, she fed her cow with a previous harvest's dried maize stalks. She referred to the health hazards of feeding cattle maize stalks infected by MLND and the extra importance of sufficiently dry stalks before feeding.

John & Maria initially fed their cattle with hay from their store and cut Napier grass in 2018's dry season. In April, they ran out of feed and used uprooted maize and beans planted in December, combined with tree leaves. Afterwards, they purchased dairy meal for lactating cows and molasses for all cows, in response to the milk production drop from 10–15 to 2 L per day. John bought eight bales of Boma Rhodes hay during this period. Hay bale prices varied from 250 to 300 KES (US$2.47–2.96 in 2019), sometimes 600 KES (US$5.92 in 2019).

Faith initially grazed her three cows on the pasture of her brother-in-law in 2017's dry period. She cut grass from her land and added Napier grass. In February, Napier grass dried out, and she shifted to banana trunks, leaves and other harvested residues, complemented with harvested bean and sugar cane residues. In March, after selling one cow, she fed two with sugar cane and banana trunks. Later, she cut down maize plants, which yielded no grains due to MLND. When the maize was finished, she purchased stalks from her sister-in-law at half market price.

Daniel & Gloria let two cows graze on the home pasture and in the forest during the first months of 2017's dry season. In February, no pasture was left, and most Napier grass had dried out. Daniel fed dried uprooted maize and beans in March. Until September, Daniel bought Boma Rhodes hay from a friend, but this was insufficient. He decided to additionally purchase and feed (possibly overpriced) sugar cane from his neighbour.

During (prolonged) dry seasons, feeding cows involved improvisation: where to get enough, affordably? All households resorted to sources of feed outside their farms: some purchased feed while others relied on sources freely (or at a lower price) available via social networks. Kosgei, a member of the same dairy group as John, discussed social networks in farming practices: ‘We gather every two weeks, we move around from farm to farm where the host shares a certain subject on his farm … We are one, I share my chaff cutter, and some [group members] come when I am not here and pick some yellow maize … I also give [fodder] seeds to group members, my neighbours and my casual workers, and I encourage them to do the same thing at home’. During the (prolonged) dry season, in some cases, keeping the cows alive was the priority, while others aimed to sustain milk production. The unpredictable, uncertain prolonged dry period resulted in households combining sources as adaptive responses to changing conditions.

Discussion

This article aims to offer conceptual space in the climate–development interface to balance mitigation and adaptation interests. Mitigation-oriented strategies likely reinforce a focus on adopting predefined practices and consequently reduce space for adaptation. Instead, we draw attention to people's abilities to navigate dynamic and changing environments. Creating space to integrate adaptive capacities into climate change policy and intervention research benefits from alternate conceptual lenses. Our case examples portray cow-feeding, as an essential ingredient of ensuring rural livelihoods and access to food, as performance. The study reveals how cow-owner create, mobilise, and use opportunities for action under so-called ‘suboptimal’ conditions, such as scarcity of resources, vulnerabilities intrinsic to livelihoods and longer-term disturbances related to drought and plant diseases.

Our study highlights a variety of affordances (Glover, 2022), emerging and disappearing in short and longer-term dimensions of feeding cattle, namely in relation to (1) material elements and characteristics of feeds, and (2) to the networks that people are a part of, making feeding practices networked responses. These specific affordances are only realised and visible in action. First, our temporal lens exposes the coupling of short and long-term rhythms in the performance of smallholder farmer practices. Driven by seasonal fluctuations and during prolonged droughts, farmers cleverly mix available and affordable feed ingredients in their immediate environment, such as food waste, crop residues, weeds, even tree leaves and forage, in combination with external inputs. Second, the results present the evolving web of feeding practices as networked responses. Our descriptive accounts show how cow owners mobilise networks to ensure access to production assets in line with personal dynamics. This makes the practice of feeding cows also social and intrinsic to communal experiences of fluctuations between scarcity and abundance. Consequently, the need to be part of a network of giving, sharing, and receiving is a salient feature of feeding cattle, linking short-term needs to long-term networked elements.

Building on these insights, we argue in favour of a shift from an exclusive focus on the adoption of predefined optimal solutions to a diagnostic and catalytic approach integrating situated adaptive performances through which farming households respond to action opportunities. Our findings indicate that a mitigation perspective contrasts with the improvisational, changing, and adaptive performance intrinsic to how smallholder farmers’ agency evolves with the rhythms of seasons and lifetimes. Our findings direct agricultural development research towards flexible diagnostics for myriad affordances that arise between cattle feeders and material, cultural and socio-economic contexts.

A diagnostic outlook makes agency embedded in everyday performance visible and centres on how smallholders anticipate what is possible and desirable under conditions of scarcity. This places the frugal performances of resource-constrained smallholder farmers at the centre and exposes how they build interconnections between human needs and natural environments (cf. Vellema et al., 2023). This diagnostic outlook guides searches for simple and effective technologies accessible to large groups of users (Roiland, 2016). Accordingly, we argue in favour of a careful diagnosis of evolving feeding configurations and detect interventions that can integrate with or catalyse local practices over time (Habermann et al., 2022). A catalytic outlook mobilises these practice-based heuristics to accommodate variation and insert these into both policy-making and mutual learning processes (Busch and Barkema, 2021). A prime focus on catalysing situated configurations of practices can be the contribution of living lab initiatives for low-emission development (Habermann and Zhang, 2022). Our proposal for making the paradox of mitigation and adaption creative and productive integrates the diagnostics of contextualised and evolving agencies of smallholders with finding policies and interventions for catalysing emerging adaptive capacities.

Conclusion

The concern addressed in this article is how to create conceptual space to marry mitigation and adaptation in the climate–development interface. We complemented the strong interest in research for development in mitigation and low-emission practices with a diagnostic interest in multiple and consecutive solutions constructed by people under vulnerable or scarce conditions. Our empirical focus on feeding practices was the gateway to expose how situated performance practices align with the short and long rhythms of agriculture and enable smallholders to seek, use and create affordances of what is available in either their immediate material environment or in extended socio-technical networks. We argue that an ex-ante focus on adaptive performance may create opportunities for aligning interventions with affordances visible in webs of situated actions. This sets the stage for a catalytic outlook for ex-ante programming and design, based on careful diagnostics of what people do and why and how this works in changing temporal and material conditions.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to the respondents who participated in this research, and to Benson Aisaik for his assistance during the fieldwork activities.

Author's note

The author Vera Vernooij is currently affiliated at Supply Chain Development Group, Wageningen Food & Biobased Research, Wageningen University & Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Ethics approval

This research was approved by the Institutional Research Ethics Committee (IREC) of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in 2017. All participants of the survey and key informant interviews provided written consent; all other participants of the research provided oral consent.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) within the ‘Greening Livestock: Incentive-based Interventions for Reducing the Climate Impact of Livestock in East Africa’ project [grant number 2000000994, 2016] and by the project ‘Multiple pathways and inclusive low emission development: navigating towards leverage points in the East-African dairy sector’ (grant number W 08.260.306) financially supported by the Food & Business Global Challenges Programme (GCP) of the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) in East Africa.

ORCID iD

Vera Vernooij

Notes

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