Protecting Kenya's Tea Crop and Livelihoods

February 20, 2016

Kenya ranks third in the world in yearly tea production. In fact, the tea industry provides a living for about 4 million Kenyans, or about 10% of the total population.¹ During January, February, and March, these people face a subtle but pervasive enemy – frost. The delicate icy coating can cause millions of dollars in damage to tea crops. In 2012, for example, a severe frost caused almost 30% tea crop loss in the Nandi area of Kenya.

Susan Malaso Kotikot, a native of Kenya who came to the U.S. a year and a half ago to accept a graduate research assistantship and work with SERVIR, wants to help mitigate crop damage by frost – and protect the livelihoods of many Kenyans.

While attending the University of Alabama-Huntsville, she has been collaborating with SERVIR-Eastern and Southern Africa (SERVIR-E&SA) and its partner organization, the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD), on a frost research project. She recently returned from a 10-day field research trip to Kericho, Kenya.

Kotikot (at left) discussing a frost prone field at James Finlays tea estate (Kericho)
with Regina Mutai (center) and Geoffrey Kipngeno (at right) of James Finlays
and Absae Sedah (center right) of Kericho County Meteorology office

“To improve their crop yields, farmers need information about where and under what conditions frost is likely to occur and how to mitigate or prevent frost damage,” says Kotikot. Her research focuses on understanding how frost occurrences are related to weather, topography, and landscape.

“If we can reveal the factors that raise the likelihood of frost, farmers can select planting locations that are not as frost prone or take other preventive measures.”

Kotikot has dealt first-hand with the caprices of nature. She was born into the Maasai community at Sintakara Village, Narok County, in Kenya's Rift Valley Province, where she spent her childhood.

“Having been born and brought up in Maasai land, I can identify with weather-related livelihood challenges,” she notes.

She had to gather firewood in the bushes, wash clothes, walk to the market over 3 miles away, help her mother with farming and cooking, and fetch water over long distances – sometimes very long because of drought.

Nevertheless, Kotikot attended Primary and Secondary School and went on to attend Kenyatta University, where she completed an internship at SERVIR-E&SA/RCMRD in Nairobi, Kenya. That work introduced her to GIS and satellite imagery technologies such as remote sensing. In 2013, Kotikot helped start a frost mapping initiative through the My Community/Our Earth /SERVIR program. Under SERVIR-E&SA/RCMRD, the project has now evolved into an automated, near real-time frost mapping system that identifies and displays probable frost-impacted areas by analysing nighttime land surface temperature datasets from NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS).

But the system needs improvements.

“MODIS provides 1-km spatial resolution estimates of land surface temperature, and there are many more factors involved in frost occurrences,” says Kotikot.

In the Kericho Highlands, where the frost mapping system is being tested, climate conditions can vary among neighboring (less than 1-km apart) locations based on wind, surrounding vegetation, and other phenomena. MODIS can’t detect those microclimatic variations. Kotikot’s field visit to frost-affected locations in Kenya’s highlands provided valuable insights that helped characterize frost-associated factors that will support her research, which ultimately is intended to enhance the SERVIR-E&SA/RCMRD system.

“With the understanding that frost occurs as a result of many things, including meteorological conditions and physical characteristics of the land, more information needs to be incorporated into the current model to improve the frost mapping system,” she says. “A major challenge has been the lack of reliable and timely ground observation data for validation and calibration of frost occurrence thresholds.”

Kotikot and Absae Sedah with local tea farmers

Kotikot (at right) and Absae Sedah (second from left)
conversing with local tea farmers affected by frost in Nandi Hills

From 5-16 January 2016, Kotikot and James Wanjohi from RCMRD visited several* Tea Research Foundation of Kenya tea plantations, other large tea estates in the region, and a number of small-scale tea farms to gather this critical ground data. Some of their activities involved geolocating frost hotspots and/or zones, taking pictures of these hotspots, and obtaining any prior information on frost occurrences in the area. They also talked first-hand with tea farmers from large plantations and small farms.

“We conducted many interviews with tea farmers to get an idea of the situation on the ground and where the specific frost prone areas are,” notes Kotikot.

These activities and interviews helped the two researchers identify several factors that showed strong associations with frost events. A few examples are lack of free flow of air across the planting site (for example, tea fields surrounded by forests experienced more frequent frost); presence of a water source/wetness nearby (associated with humid conditions); and being located within valley sides and depressions as compared to the surrounding landscape (cold air, like water, flows downhill and pools in depressions).

SERVIR-E&SA/RCMRD’s frost mapping system is only in its initial development phase, and these data collection and ground validation activities are critical to the system’s continued advancement, and to the evaluation of frost-related parameters and their implications.

The research trip also provided an opportunity for RCMRD to co-develop with Kotikot an online reporting system for farmers to report frost events -- including information such as precise location, date, extent, and severity.

“Most importantly, we established collaborations with stakeholders to support and encourage recording and sharing of data on frost events in the future,” notes Wanjohi. “This will help us validate the current frost mapping system, make it reliable, and move toward the next phase – frost forecasting.”

Notes:

¹Tea Research Foundation of Kenya Quarterly BULLETIN Vol.17: No.1, January/March 2012

*Places visited: