While many farmers in arid and semi-arid counties face erratic seasons and depleted soils, Dr Harun Warui- the lead agroecologist and food rights coordinator at Heinrich Boell Foundation, views the region through distinct lens. To him, these areas offer immense opportunity. In this conversation with Seeds of Gold, Dr Warui unpacks the intersection of ecological design, living soils and farmer seed sovereignty- explaining why surviving a drought is only the baseline and how working with natural cycles can transform fragile harvests into resilient and profitable enterprises.
A field full of cracks means a water crisis for a farmer. When agroecologists look at such a field, what do they see?
A farmer naturally focuses on the missing input – rainfall. From an agroecological perspective, however, I see a breakdown in system design. The crisis is not always just the lack of water, but how rapidly the moisture we receive is lost because the living soil structure has been destroyed and the land lacks ecological cover.
An agroecologist sees a landscape out of balance. Rain might fall for only three days in a season. If your soil is rich in organic matter and your field is planted with biodiverse, deep-rooted polycultures, the ecosystem captures that moisture like a sponge and holds it deep in the root zone.
We are looking at an ecosystem management problem, not just a weather problem. We must shift from viewing drought as an unforeseen catastrophe and start designing agricultural landscapes that anticipate dry spells as a standard climatic reality.
People confuse drought escape with true ecosystem resilience. A crop maturing in 60 days merely dodges the dry spell without building long-term stamina. At a cellular level, resilient plants perform osmotic adjustment to pull soil water under stress. But true farm resilience comes from structural diversity.
A polyculture combining deep-rooted legumes, hardy grains and agroforestry trees cools the soil and manages water collectively – ensuring the farm functions as a living unit rather than collapsing.
If you could eliminate one habitual practice from dryland farming today, what would that be?
I would do away with recreational tillage. The instinct to plough deeply every season is ingrained. Every pass of a traditional mouldboard plough is an act of moisture theft and soil destruction in drylands.
When you turn over dry soil, you expose the cool, microbially active layers directly to the intense sun, burning off organic carbon and evaporating what little moisture remains from the previous season.
Repetitive ploughing also destroys the delicate fungal networks – like mycorrhizae – that help plant roots absorb water and essential minerals like phosphorus.
In dryland agroecology, zero-till or minimum-tillage approaches, combined with organic mulching, are non-negotiable if you want to keep the living soil hydrated and biological activity thriving beneath the surface.
Why are traditional farm-saved seeds often said to be losing their edge against modern climate patterns?
Traditional open-pollinated landraces carry invaluable genetic diversity and historical adaptation, but climate shifts are happening faster than unmanaged, casual selection can keep up.
The issue is not that traditional seeds are inherently flawed; it’s that community seed systems require active, structured stewardship.
When seeds are saved year after year without deliberate selection protocols, they can lose vigour or accumulate seed-borne pathogens.
The agroecological solution isn’t to replace farmer seeds with expensive commercial hybrids that create corporate dependency and financial burden. Instead, we must strengthen community seed banks and participatory breeding programmes.
By combining indigenous farmer knowledge with ecological science, crop growers can continuously select and adapt resilient landraces to their specific local micro-climates.
As weather patterns shift, emerging threats like fall armyworm and stem borers are devastating crops and harvests. Is genetic resistance in a seed the primary defence?
Agroecology rejects the search for a single silver bullet inside a seed bag. Chemical sprays and genetic fixes create an expensive input treadmill because pests adapt quickly.
Our primary defence is ecological design. Push-pull systems use Desmodium to repel pests from cereals while border grasses pull them away.
Integrating flowering trees harbours natural predators like parasitic wasps, while polycultures create physical barriers that naturally disrupt pest life cycles.
How do we break the psychological obsession with maize in counties where it fails four out of five seasons?
White corn is a cultural anchor across Eastern Africa. Advising a farmer to substitute sorghum or millet often feels to them like accepting household hunger because maize equals survival in the public mind.
Shifting this mindset requires addressing farm economics and risk management rather than lecturing farmers on diet.
Investing scarce capital in land preparation, labour and expensive inputs for a high-risk crop that yields zero bags is financial ruin.
Switching to pigeon peas, green grams or cowpeas guarantees a return – yielding nutritious food directly and generating cash flow to purchase grain off the market from surplus zones.
We must reframe crop diversification not as a lifestyle downgrade, but as a smart wealth-preservation and risk-spreading strategy.
Every seed carries an invisible geographical address written directly into its genetics. A variety selected for high-altitude, low-temperature dry zones will struggle if planted in low-altitude, high-temperature coastal dryland, even if both locations receive identical annual rainfall amounts.
When choosing crops, farmers must look closely at ecological zoning, including altitude, night-time temperatures, soil biological health and heat degree units.
Planting outside an optimal agroecological zone of the seed is like placing a desert camel in a rainforest. It may survive, but it certainly won’t thrive or yield effectively.
Can a seed alone pull a farming household out of poverty, or is it useless without ecological land management?
A seed requires a functional ecological foundation to unlock its potential. Tossing high-grade seed onto bare, compacted soil without a water retention plan guarantees failure.
Practices like zai pits – small, organic-matter-filled basins that trap runoff – alongside contour bunds and heavy mulching create localised micro-environments that store water and feed beneficial soil microbes.
Intense torrential downpours in drylands shatter bare soil aggregates, creating an impermeable surface crust that forces rainwater to run off and erode topsoil.
Soil armour means keeping the ground covered year-round using living cover crops or organic mulch. This protective layer absorbs rain impact, lowers soil temperature by up to 10 degrees Celsius, protects earthworms and fungi and allows water time to infiltrate deep into the root zone.
Agricultural science often struggles with the last mile of getting solutions from research labs to the smallholder. How do we fix that pipeline?
We must stop treating smallholders as passive recipients of scientific lectures and start engaging them directly as co-researchers and innovators.
Top-down extension models where external experts deliver finished packages rarely achieve lasting adoption. Participatory plant breeding and agroecological field schools are the key.
Scientists bring ecological principles, but farmers evaluate crops right in their own fields based on real-world criteria such as drought survival, inter-cropping compatibility, ease of threshing, storage durability, and taste.
When farmers co-create solutions under their actual management conditions, adoption happens naturally without massive marketing campaigns.
The shift from subsistence survival to commercial enterprise among young, emerging agripreneurs gives me confidence.
For decades, farming in these zones was dismissed as a last resort for those with no choice. Today, a new generation approaches drylands as a high-value commercial opportunity.
They are combining digital weather forecasts, climate-resilient landraces and organic soil management to access growing regional markets for pulses, sesame and oilseeds.
Arid regions possess distinct competitive advantages, including inexhausted soils, year-round solar energy and vast spatial capacity.
When you master precision water harvesting, soil ecology and ecological crop design, these areas reveal themselves for what they truly are – sleeping agricultural giants.
