Nakuru County has been identified as a project area for the Climate Smart Research and Innovation for Livestock Development Program in Kenya with a focus on dairy in collaboration with Self Help Africa (SHA) and KALRO.
According to Nakuru County CeC in charge of agriculture, Dr. Immaculate Maina, the move will help the County grow its dairy value chain.
Speaking when she hosted a delegation from Self Help Africa, Dr. Maina emphasized on the County’s keenness to support the promotion of climate smart fodder and extension messaging to empower more farmers into increasing their productivity.
The pilot program is targeting 2,000 farmers from 5 cooperatives and focuses on developing and demonstrating new climate smart production systems that increase productivity and profitability.
Farmers will learn how to improve forages hence attain sustainable livestock nutrition for their animals.
Dr. Maina urged the stakeholders to diversify and help cooperatives with production deficits to be at par with the well-established ones to boost their production and profits.
In addition to that, the project looks to develop an innovation hub which will support on-farm innovation as well as build capacity to extension officers on forage based production technology.