BARINGO, Kenya — Salina Chepsat and a neighbor are loading tomatoes into a vehicle in the scorching midday heat. Chepsat picked the produce earlier that morning from her farm in the remote village of Loboi, a stone’s throw from west-central Kenya’s Lake Bogoria. From there, it’s headed to the market in the town of Marigat, 30 kilometers (19 miles) away. Amid the overlapping challenges facing her community in largely semiarid Baringo county — repeated droughts, badly degraded land, and conflict between and among ethnic communities — this tall, 49-year-old widow and mother of three is prospering as a farmer. This season’s bumper harvest is special to her, Chepsat tells Mongabay, because she plans to use the proceeds of her labor to pay to roof and plaster a new house she’s been building for the past two years. “When I settled here, I was mainly planting maize, beans and millet. Although I was earning income to sustain me and my children, I wasn’t making enough to construct a good house like the one I am building,” she says. “Unpredictable rainfall has been a limiting factor, especially for maize.” Making compost on a farm in Baringo County: the Indigenous Women and Girls Initiative’s is training women — and some men — to make organic fertilizer and pesticides. Image by Gilbert Nakweya for Mongabay. Farming on the rise Chepsat learned to farm from her parents and grandparents. But for those older generations of Indigenous Endorois, agriculture was usually a sideline to herding livestock.…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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