Why Climate-Smart Farming Fails Without Cash in Farmers’ Pockets
What Kenyan farmers say really blocks climate adaptation
Climate‑smart agriculture promises higher yields, resilience to climate shocks, and lower emissions, all at once. Governments fund it. Donors promote it. Training workshops proliferate.
And yet across much of rural Kenya, uptake remains stubbornly low.
A recent study asks a deceptively simple question: if farmers are motivated, climate risks are rising, and support exists, why is climate‑smart agriculture still not spreading?
The answer, according to farmers themselves, is not ignorance, culture, or reluctance to change. It is poverty.
Drawing on in‑depth discussions with 146 farmers and interviews with policy actors in southern Kenya, the research traces how different explanations for low uptake compete, overlap, and ultimately fall away. Farmers overwhelmingly point to one constraint that sits beneath all others: a lack of money, assets, and spare labour.
Climate‑smart practices often require upfront investment - seeds, fertiliser, fencing, water infrastructure, vaccines, or simply time away from paid work. For households already struggling to eat, even small risks are too costly to take.
This finding sounds obvious, but it cuts against how climate‑smart agriculture is usually promoted. Support programmes routinely prioritise training and information. Extension officers teach farmers what to plant and when. NGOs run demonstrations. Private companies market new seed varieties. Yet farmers interviewed in this study repeatedly note that knowing what to do is not the same as being able to do it.
Many farmers described situations where training existed but adoption did not follow because inputs were unaffordable. Others spoke about being advised to plant crops that could not be found locally, or to dig structures that required paid labour they did not have. Hunger itself becomes a barrier to adaptation: time spent seeking casual work to buy food is time not spent investing in new farming practices.
The disconnect is not just between farmers and technologies, but between farmers and the institutions meant to support them. Key informants - including government and NGO actors - were far more likely to emphasise education or awareness as the core problem. Poverty was sometimes treated as unfortunate but secondary, or even as a reason not to expect adoption at all. This mismatch helps explain why well‑intentioned programmes struggle to deliver change on the ground.
Market conditions compound the problem. Farmers face rising input costs, volatile output prices, and exploitative intermediaries. Even when climate‑smart practices might improve yields in the long run, weak markets undermine incentives to invest. Gender dynamics deepen these constraints further: women are often more willing to adopt new practices but have less access to land, income, and decision‑making power.
The study’s central implication is uncomfortable for climate policy. If poverty is the primary barrier, then climate‑smart agriculture cannot succeed through information and training alone. It requires direct financial or in‑kind support that lowers risk and reduces upfront costs. Without this, adaptation strategies simply ask the poorest farmers to shoulder climate risk on behalf of everyone else.
This does not mean training, extension, or market reform are irrelevant. It means they are secondary. For farmers living on extremely thin margins, the constraint is not attitude or awareness. It is capacity. Policies that fail to start there will keep mistaking effort for impact.
Listening more carefully to farmers alters what effective climate adaptation looks like. It shifts the focus from persuading people to change, towards enabling them to survive. That is a harder, more political task - but without it, climate‑smart agriculture will remain smart in theory and unreachable in practice.
Lenhardt, A., Kopper, R. & Saha, A. (2026). Leading barriers to climate‑smart agriculture uptake in Kenya: a process‑tracing approach with Bayesian updating to emphasise farmers’ perspectives. Regional Environmental Change, 26, 43. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-026-02522-0
Dr Amanda Lenhardt is a Senior Lecturer in International Development at King’s College London. Her research focuses on poverty dynamics, climate change, and how social protection and agricultural policy interact in low‑income settings.