ABSTRACT
Declining soil fertility is a major cause of low per capita food production in the smallholder farms of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). To address this challenge, studies in the central highlands of Kenya and other areas in SSA have identified multiple management interventions that can reverse this decline and mitigate problems of food scarcity (Bationo et al. 2003). In central Kenya, large increases in maize yield with the application of Tithonia, Calliandra and Leucaena biomass have been reported (Mugendi et al. 1999; Mugwe et al. 2008). However, past research shows that the adoption of new agricultural tech nologies among the smallholder farmers, including soil management practices, has generally lagged behind scientific and technological advances, and hence their impact on agricultural production has been low (Okuro et al. 2002). Some of the challenges to the accessibility and utilization of integrated soil fertility management (ISFM) include inadequacies in communication, dissemination and approaches to scale-up the technologies.
