This morning, I woke up an hour too early (I had accidentally set my clock to the wrong time)! To compensate, I doubled the standard two cups of Kenyan ‘chai’ (tea) to four. Mmm… sweet, sweet chai! My research has been moving along ‘pole pole’ (slowly) over the past few days, and I’m looking forward to tomorrow when I’ll finally begin serious field sampling again. I completed surveying in the lower part of the Amala river watershed a few days ago. I’ve now moved upstream, and upland, and over the next week or so, I’ll be, interviewing small farmers in the highlands about their natural resource use and management strategies.
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Christopher, a WWF/GLOWS extension officer, picked me and Reuben, my interpreter, up from Mulot and took us to a small highland town where he was delivering fruit tree seedlings to a local farmers organization. We visited a biologically-diversified ‘shamba’ (farm) belonging to one of the organization’s members. Before WWF began working with them, they had been growing monocultures of maize year after year. All of the neighboring farms had fertile, orange-brown, volcanic soils (as opposed to the black clay soils of Mulot) which, judging by the heavy slope of the land, were likely being carried, during heavy rains, along the valley to the Amala river. Heavy erosion from agriculture, deforestation, and road runoff has turned the river the same orange-brown color.
From the shamba’s highest point, the view was spectacular! The agricultural mosaic, laid out across the highland landscape, had a beautiful heterogeneity to it. Each field, enclosed by trees, gave off its own unique shades of green and brown. My initial  feelings of wonder gave way to a rising concern as my eyes were drawn to the distant forest edge. The remnant Mau forest, the source of the Amala river, still looked thick from the distance at which I was standing, but 50 years ago, it would have stretched as far the eye could see, and in another 50 years, it might well disappear. Where trees were once dominant, tea has taken over.
 Tea is everywhere! Tomorrow, and over the next days, I’m sure I’ll be seeing a lot more of it. It can only be grown in these highland areas where rainfall and temperature requirements can consistently be met which, unfortunately, means that tea plantations compete with indigenous forest, which has species in the same niche, as a land use. Tea is currently the more valuable of the two land uses. It is Kenya’s most important agricultural product and provides smallholder farmers with a considerable portion of their income.
While the market for tea is monitored by the Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA), little is known about the values (economic and ecological) of the different native forest species. One of the objectives of my research is to create a system of ranking trees (indigenous and exotic), in terms of their on-farm  reforestation value. The system will balance farmers’ preferences and livelihood considerations with biophysical and ecological considerations. The information and analysis will be disseminated, with the help of WWF/GLOWS, to tree nurseries in the watershed. The nurseries, operated by the community-based Mara River Water Users Association (MRWUA) and the Government of Kenya’s Forestry Department, can use the ranking system, in the future, as a basis for promoting species with high dual values (economic and ecological) over species with only single values.
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