Maize seed and fertilizer on credit is what One Acre Fund does best in Kenya. But there are many areas of the country where maize cultivation on credit simply does not make economic sense. In these locations, low rainfall and poor soil conditions virtually guarantee weak maize harvests. One Acre Fund wants to help smallholder farmers increase their harvests in these areas too, which means we must adapt our core program model to different crops and farming conditions.

To learn about the challenges of working in low rainfall areas, we recently started a new trial program in a dryland district bordering Lake Victoria in Nyanza Province. The program is only a few months old, but we have already started tackling two significant challenges: low population density and limited water access.

Low rainfall tends to correlate with low population density throughout the world, and Kenya is no exception. Low population density is challenging for numerous reasons. First, One Acre Fund’s service model entails frequent contact between field officers and farmers. When farmers live further apart, this contact becomes more time consuming, as well as more costly. Second, fewer farmers means fewer potential clients, which means our trial program will require a higher adoption percentage than most One Acre Fund districts to reach sustainability. In high-density areas, enrolling 10 percent of households in the first year would be considered a major win. In a low-density area, with fewer households to serve, we must enroll closer to 40 percent of households to achieve the same level of sustainability. To accomplish this target, we are experimenting with field officer transport and farmer mobilization to maximize our ability to reach clients.

Our second major challenge is water access. In our existing districts in Kenya, high rainfall levels are conducive to growing maize. In our trial program, we are offering tree and bean inputs to farmers. But even tree seeds need a fair amount of water—they must be cultivated in water-hungry nurseries during the dry season prior to transplant during the rains. Other One Acre Fund districts planting trees use seed beds as nurseries, which require 20-40 liters of water per day. Many farmers in the dryland district must walk an hour or more each day to access this amount of water. It’s possible that farmers will be willing to invest the labor to produce healthy tree seedlings, but there is no way to guarantee full adoption.

To address this problem, we are developing a less water-intensive planting method involving smaller bucket nurseries. This method should allow farmers to plant the same number of seeds using only around 2 liters of water per day. After a few months in the buckets, seedlings are transplanted into perforated tubes. Five hundred tubed seedlings only require 15-20 liters of water per day. By significantly reducing the amount of water needed, we hope to save our farmers time and money and ensure that they have strong tree seedlings for transplant during the rains.

This is only the first season for the dryland district. We plan to open a trial nursery this summer to experiment with alternative low-rainfall crops, including peanuts, millet, and short-maturity maize varieties. We are focused on offering products and services that are adapted to the challenges our clients face. Through this “farmers first” strategy, we plan to help dryland farmers achieve the same income increases that our other One Acre Fund farmers have achieved.