Love Your Neighbour, Question His Advice

Hey, Hannatu here 👋

So agriculture contributes about 30% of Kenya's GDP and employs more than 40% of the population. 

Most of the country's food comes from smallholder farmers working just a few acres of land.

And every season, those farmers make dozens of decisions that determine whether the harvest comes in or doesn't.

When should I plant? Which seed should I buy? Should I till the soil again? Should I trust the rains? Should I trust the neighbour?

Researchers at Spindle Design, a Kenya-based research firm, recently tried to understand how those decisions actually get made. 

They surveyed 529 farmers and conducted in-depth interviews, group discussions, and on-farm observations with another 84 farmers across Western Kenya and the Mount Kenya region.

What they found wasn't a lack of information. It was something more complicated.

Picture a farmer in Bungoma preparing his land before the planting season.

He ploughs his field. Then he ploughs it again for a second and third time. After that, he leaves the land bare for weeks, sometimes up to two months, waiting for the rains.

If you ask him why, he'll tell you exactly what generations before him have said. The repeated tilling kills weeds. It controls pests. It prepares the land properly.

It sounds thorough and responsible, but it’s also slowly destroying the soil.

Spindle found this pattern consistently across Western Kenya. 

Whether farmers used tractors or ox-ploughs, the routine was the same. Multiple rounds of tilling followed by long periods where soil sat exposed to sun and rain, accelerating erosion and nutrient loss.

Farmers have a phrase for what happens over time. They say the soil becomes "tired." But very few connect that tiredness to the tilling itself. The decline feels like something that simply happens.

A few hours away in the Mount Kenya region, farmers are doing almost the opposite. Most prepare their land once and plant immediately. 

The difference isn't that one group understands soil science better. They simply learned different habits.

That gap between what farmers are doing and what their soil actually needs is the core problem Spindle’s research keeps returning to.

It's easy to imagine knowledge flowing in a straight line.

Researchers develop better practices → Extension officers teach farmers → Farmers adopt them.

In reality, it is not as smooth.

Farmers build knowledge from many places at once. Neighbours. Family. Agrovets. Demo farms. Radio. WhatsApp groups. Watching the weather. Trying something one season and seeing what happens the next.

Not every source carries the same weight.

But we’ve learned that the most trusted source isn't an expert. It’s another farmer.

That trust is built on something logical. Neighbours farm the same soils, grow the same crops, and experience the same rainfall. If something works next door, it seems reasonable to believe it'll work for you too.

Charity Wakuthie, a farmer from Embu, put it simply: “I believe advice from another farmer because I can see it in practice on their farm. You can't believe it without seeing.”

That same trust also allows incomplete knowledge to travel fast. Wakuthie remembers a cousin recommending a pesticide combination that had worked on his farm. She tried it. It didn't work. It’s not like the cousin was trying to mislead her. The advice had simply travelled through a trusted network without being tested in her specific context.

The repeated tilling follows the same logic. Farmers weren't ignoring better practices. They were faithfully repeating what they'd seen work for years.

Even expert advice isn't always straightforward.

Government extension officers remain highly trusted, but most farmers reported having little meaningful contact with one. Private agronomists provide high-quality advice, but at a price that many smallholder farmers cannot afford. 

That leaves agrovets, the agricultural supply stores.

Farmers rely on these agrovets for advice and agricultural inputs, but many also understand that recommendations from agrovets may be influenced by what happens to be in stock.

And according to researchers at Spindle, agrovets are not giving advice that is directly harming farmers.

Repeated tilling wasn't an isolated finding. Researchers kept seeing the same pattern across both regions. Farmers had the right instinct but just didn't always have enough information to make it effective.

Take intercropping, for example.

Across both regions, many farmers grow multiple crops together because they understand it spreads risk and improves soil health.

What's often missing is knowing which crops work best together and how to manage them.

Or fertiliser. Most farmers know their crops need it. Without soil testing, many apply fertiliser that doesn't match their soil or crop type. Soil testing is widely recognised as valuable, but most smallholder farmers see it as something meant for larger, wealthier operations.

The same thing happens with pest management. Most farmers wait until insects or disease become visible before acting. By the time the damage is visible, much of the crop has already been affected.

Farmers aren't rejecting smarter agriculture. In many cases, they're already practising parts of it. They're just missing pieces.

For generations, farmers have relied on natural signs to guide decisions. Butterflies suggested drought. Rainbows hinted at rainfall. The movement of locusts pointed to wet seasons.

These weren't superstitions. They were observations built over decades of watching the same landscape behave predictably.

Unfortunately, climate change has now made those observations unreliable.

Between 1990 and 2020, Kenya experienced 16 major droughts affecting an estimated 53 million people. Floods, prolonged dry spells, and shifting rainfall patterns have disrupted one of the oldest knowledge systems farmers have.

Kevin Simiyu has farmed in Bungoma since 2017. “There's very little you can do about climate change,” he told researchers. “It's very unpredictable. The weather can be extreme: drought, rain, or cold. I have been affected mostly by drought, but I'll still plant.”

That sentence captures the reality of millions of farmers. 

They simply cannot wait for certainty. They plant anyway. And they adapt as they go, changing planting dates, switching to shorter maize varieties, diversifying into cassava and sweet potatoes, picking up income from trading and milling between seasons.

They're learning. But they're learning while the rules keep changing.

Every harvest begins with a decision about who and what to trust.

When those decisions go wrong, the consequences don't stay on one farm. Lower yields mean less food reaching markets. Declining soil fertility means farms become less productive over time. Families spend more on inputs and harvest less. Across a country where agriculture remains central to livelihoods and the economy, individual decisions accumulate into national consequences.

For years, governments, researchers, and development organisations have invested billions in climate-smart agriculture. Better seeds. Better fertiliser. Better technology.

Spindle’s research suggests another piece deserves just as much attention: Better learning.

Because climate-smart agriculture isn't only about inventing practices that work. 

It's about making sure those practices move from one farm to the next in ways farmers trust, understand, and can actually apply before another season slips away.

What other normal practices hurt farmers where you’re from?

→ Let me know here.

Cheers,