Lead farmer and early adopter of climate-smart agriculture, meet Phoebe Mwangangi of Makueni County, Kenya
Meet Phoebe Mwangangi from Makueni County, Kenya. She is a lead community farmer and an early adopter of climate-smart agriculture as a result of AICCRA's activities with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Kenya.
AICCRA works to scale climate-smart agriculture and climate information services that reach millions of smallholder farmers in Africa. By listening to and learning from the farmers we work with, we can better understand the challenges and opportunities they face and how climate-smart technologies and information can help.
53-year-old Phoebe Mwangangi comes from the predominantly dryland areas of Makueni County in Eastern Kenya. She practices subsistence integrated farming on a four-acre of arable land used for crop production and a six-acre shrubland that is, for a month in a year, a grazing space after some precipitation.
Phoebe is one of the early adopters and lead farmers in her community, and has embraced climate-smart farming practices disseminated and scaled by the AICCRA project to build resilience for smallholder farmers.
Phoebe has been farming for over 20 years, mostly growing beans, pigeon peas and maize. She keeps a small flock of sheep and one dairy cow. She says the weather has changed significantly during this period, with longer and hotter dry seasons that destroyed her crops every year.