نبذة مختصرة : Emerging challenges to farming drives farming systems to have three strategies; intensification options optimizing resources and technological innovations, firm diversification orchestrating interdependencies among sectoral boundaries, and transition to new system and trajectories. The trajectory shift emphasis on how new sectoral systems (dairy sector) emerges, and what is the link with the previous sectoral system (coffee) in terms of impact pathway. This paper, therefore, presents (1) how the transition from coffee to dairy based farming system in the coffee agroforestry systems of Murang?a County, central Kenya is taking place? (2) What derives for the transition from coffee to dairy based systems? And (3) what contributes the transition from intensified coffee based to dairy based farming system on household food security? Our data collection consists of three sources. Household survey (120), focus group discussions (9 FGDs) and stakeholders? interview (15 interviews). Coffee production in Kenya has declined by 65% in the last 30 years, and as much as 5 times in Murang?a County, a major coffee producing area. The dairy sector is, however, in opposite visualizing sharp increase in volume of production and price. The study finds that innovation process and actors? interaction differs for the coffee and dairy based systems. Actors in the coffee are limited, the system is highly centralized with limited options to farmers to process and market their product while the dairy sector is less informally controlled by demand based business, comparatively numerous actors with limited government intervention, various options to process and marketing products. Exponential increase in production cost which is a function of coffee diseases and institutional failure (financial and none financial) of the coffee sector while strong public and private intuitions are emerging in the dairy sector is the other driver of the transition.
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