By Gilbert Nakweya
Salina Chepsat and a neighbor are loading tomatoes into a vehicle in the scorching midday heat. Chepsat picked the produce earlier that morning from her farm in the remote village of Loboi, a stone’s throw from Lake Bogoria. From there, it is headed to the market in the town of Marigat, 30 kilometers away.
Amid the overlapping challenges facing her community in largely semiarid Baringo county, repeated droughts, badly degraded land, and conflict between and among ethnic communities, the 49-year-old widow and mother of three is prospering as a farmer.
This season’s bumper harvest is special to her, because she plans to use the proceeds of her labor to roof and plaster a new house she has been building for the past two years.
“When I settled here, I was mainly planting maize, beans and millet. Although I was earning income to sustain me and my children, I was not making enough to construct a good house like the one I am building,” she says. “Unpredictable rainfall has been a limiting factor, especially for maize.”
Chepsat learned to farm from her parents and grandparents. But for those older generations of Indigenous Endorois, agriculture was usually a sideline to herding livestock. For Chepsat, it has become a more central concern.
She still keeps some chickens and goats, but for her livelihood she grows tomatoes, spinach, chili peppers, beans and bananas, as well as maize, millet and sorghum on the 2.5-acre plot she bought five years ago.
Chepsat credits her recent success to training she received from a local community-based organization, the Indigenous Women and Girls Initiative (IWGI), focused on women, helping them to establish and improve seed banks and kitchen gardens, and plant fruit and other trees.
The training prompted Chepsat to diversify the range of crops she plants and introduced her to techniques to make her own organic pesticides and fertilizer. She prepares soil-enriching compost from her goats’ droppings, weeds she pulls up from around her farm, and organic household waste.
To protect her vegetables from voracious white fly, she soaks a mixture of ash and chili for two or three days, then carefully applies the paste to the plants’ leaves.
“When I harvest food from my farm, I am confident what I am eating is safe. I don’t get scared that it could be contaminated with chemicals,” she says. “My farming is purely organic, my grandparents did not use pesticides but practiced crop farming successfully.”
Monica Yator, the founder and leader of IWGI, says she’s pleased the initiative’s training has raised awareness of the potential hazards of agrochemicals among farmers around Marigat.
“The use of pesticides has been very rampant in many farms around here, and we are telling our farmers to avoid using them,” she says. “They are acquired without any knowledge of use, and sometimes tomatoes are harvested the same day they are sprayed. This is a risk to the health of our people and the soils.”
Yator is herself a member of another Indigenous pastoralist community in Baringo county, the Tugen, and the training she offers focuses on helping women from communities like her own, the Ilchamus and Chepsat’s Endorois, to understand and adopt permaculture techniques to improve their harvests in the face of increasingly uncertain conditions.
Awiti says low rainfall in this region means the land is not really suitable for farming. But the techniques being advocated by Yator’s IWGI may play an important role in the future flourishing of Ilchamus and Endorois in this landscape. IWGI is offering practical support to pastoralist communities here to turn to agriculture to produce food, and to grow fodder for their livestock.
“We have to make good use of our farms,” Yator says. “We are telling the pastoralists that even with degraded land, we can restore them and make them arable for crops and pasture for their animals.”
But as Yator and her team try to engage women in farming, many immediately run into difficulties securing land to plant on. When Chepsat lost her husband 10 years ago, her brothers- in-law took charge of the 10 acres of land that her husband owned and dedicated it to grazing of their animals.
“It took me 10 years of court battles to get ownership and rights of the land transferred to me,” Chepsat says. “But even after this, I did not feel safe by their threats to harm me, forcing me to purchase the 2 acres where I have settled and doing my farming.”
Awiti emphasizes the importance of understanding the value of sustainable farming practices in areas like Baringo, which receives barely 1,000 millimeters of rainfall annually. “The rain received here is not abundant enough to support high-biomass pasture and crop production,” he says.
“The question is really how do we create infrastructure that reduces pressure on natural resources so that they are not cutting trees, they can access water and make use of abundance of sunshine to produce energy, for example.”
The answers, he says, include thinking about more than just production, and accounting for access to land, fodder for animals, and affordable food for people.
The article was first published by Mongabay: https://news.mongabay.com/2025/09/permaculture-promises-peace-food-increased-equality-in-kenyan-county/
