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Title Feeding cattle under suboptimal conditions in Kenya: From emphasising technical (non-)adoption to stimulating adaptive performance
Full text https://research.wur.nl/en/publications/feeding-cattle-under-suboptimal-conditions-in-kenya-from-emphasis
Date 2024
Author(s) Vernooij, Vera; de Koeijer, Jan; Vellema, Sietze; Crane, Todd; Maiyo, Nathan
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.
Subject(s) Dairy; East Africa; adaptation; livestock; low emission development; mitigation; practices; skills; smallholder
Language en
Relation https://edepot.wur.nl/661097
Type of publication Article/Letter to editor
Format application/pdf
Source Outlook on Agriculture 53 (2024) 2; ISSN: 0030-7270
Rights Wageningen University & Research
Identifier 10.1177/00307270241255384
Repository Wageningen - University of Wageningen
Added to C-A: 2024-07-11;10:30:10