soils, lava soils and alluvial soils are scattered across the region depending on the distribution of rainfall, altitude and parent rock type.

# **3. Study site and the data**

# **_3.1 Sampling and data collection_**

The main data for this study were based on a sample of 816 households in Kenya. The data were collected from six out of eight provinces in Kenya between June and August 2004. Two provinces were excluded from the sample, Nairobi because of urbanization, and North Eastern because of aridity and because of inaccessibility of households and other field logistics. From the eight provinces, 38 out of 46 districts were selected for the field survey.<sup>4</sup> The districts chosen captured variability in a wide range of agro-climatic conditions (rainfall, temperatures and soils), market characteristics (market accessibility, infrastructure, etc.) and agricultural diversity, among other factors. Each district was then divided into agroecological zones and samples of three different farm types/sizes: large, medium and small chosen from each ecological zone. Detailed information from the Ministry of Agriculture and from the _Farm Management Handbook_ (Jaetzold & Schmidt 1982) was used to help identify agro-ecological zones and farm types _._ The sampling procedure was purposely designed to target at least four households from each agro-ecological zone, comprising at least one household from each farm type. The fourth household in each of the agro-climatic zones would be of any of the three farm types depending on the frequency of the farm types in the district and zone chosen.

Our sample included both crop and livestock farming households, including a number of group ranches and commercial farms. On commercial farms, farm managers were interviewed in the place of absentee farm owners, and group leaders were interviewed on ranches. The limitation of doing this is that there was scant information on household characteristics for these questionnaires. The distribution of the sample across provinces and districts and agro-ecological zones is presented in Table 3. We omitted the tropical alpine zone which is found on the top of the mountains but sampled all other zones in the chosen districts using the criteria discussed earlier. The final sample of households selected and interviewed are listed in the last two columns of Table 3 (see also Table 4). In some districts, only small farmers could be interviewed depending on the scale of production prevailing in the district. The distribution of households by farm type in the final sample of households interviewed is shown in Table 4.

# _The research instrument_

The Kenyan climate and agriculture project adopted the survey design for sampling used by all the countries in the regional GEF/World Bank project. It also used the same questionnaire, which was designed jointly by the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies of Yale University and the Centre for Environmental Economics and Policy in Africa (CEEPA), University of Pretoria. The questionnaire details the socio-economic characteristics of the

> 4 Before 1996, Kenya had 46 districts but these were subsequently subdivided to make a total of the current 72 districts. The sampling frame was based on the old district classification, in order to make the data compatible with data on long-term climate variables.

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