Cattle Trading and Land Use Strategies in the Arid and Semi-Arid Lands of Kenya: Modern Approaches to Livestock Production Challenges in an Integrated System

Abstract

In response to increasing levels of invasions and illegal grazing of pastoral cattle herds on commercial rangeland, commercial ranches have begun to develop new land-use strategies in partnership with neighboring pastoral communities, in order to increase security on the rangeland. These shared land-use strategies can also be used to reduce the overwhelming environmental and economic uncertainty, facing pastoral households, and encourage their integration into the cash economy and rehabilitation of their degraded community rangeland. This thesis analyzes a variety of currently used strategies, in terms of their net relative profitability or value-added, for both commercial ranches and pastoralists, to determine patterns of indifference and preference for alternative strategies, based on a number of variables and parameters specific to each contract. It also analyzes current cattle land-use patterns on commercial ranches, in terms of foraging selectivity, to determine the ecological sustainability of cattle rearing programs. We find that cattle land-use activity is strongly correlated to grazing activity, and that cattle seem to selectively graze on the most productive vegetation, measured by percentage greenery. Our financial analysis finds that even without consideration of the reduced mortality rates on commercial ranches, there are critical regions in which both commercial ranches and pastoralists should be incentivized to engage in new co-rearing/risk-sharing land-use strategies, assuming moderate increases in fattening rates, relative to those experienced by cattle under leasing arrangements.