Chapter 1
Introduction

The ‘Agro-ecological Land Resources Assessment for Agricultural Development Planning’ is a case study concerned with the development and implementation of a national level methodology for the determination of land use potentials of land resources of individual districts for policy formulation and development planning. This case study has been carried out by FAO and IIASA in collaboration with the Government of Kenya (FAO 1984).

The work is described in a main report entitled: Resources Data Base and Land Productivity. This main report is supported by technical annexes which deal with details.

In Part I of the crop productivity assessment model (Technical Annex 4), agro-climatic suitability is assessed first. The agro-climatic suitability is then modified by the application of soil and landform limitation ratings (agro-edaphic suitability).

Basic agro-climatic and agro-edaphic suitabilities with input specific attainable yield are available through earlier work for all crops in Table 1.1 (FAO 1978 and 1980) except for crops of barley, oat, cowpea, green gram and pigeonpea.

This report presents the basic agro-climatic and agro-edaphic suitability classifications for these five crops for rainfed conditions in Kenya.

TABLE 1.1
List of crops for rainfed productivity assessment

¹ Includes common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), lima bean (Phaseolus lunatus). runner bean (Phaseolus occineus) and tepary bean (Phaseolus acutifolius).

FIGURE 2.1
Schematic presentation of the methodology (numbers in parenthesis refer to the activities described in the text)