Land Suitability Study For Rice growing in Kisumu County

Abstract

Optimum utilization of the available land resources for sustainable agriculture requires land suitability analysis as a prerequisite in order to attain maximum agricultural production. In Kenya, agriculture is the backbone of national economy and rice is one of the most consumed crops but with low production rate which does not meet the demands due to rapid population growth. This study is prompted by this rice crop deficit and the main aim is to determine land suitability for rice farming using remote sensing and GIS based on Multi-Criteria Evaluation (MCE) approach and to compare present land use with potential land use to fmd more sites in order to expand rice crop growing in Kisumu County. Four suitability criteria i.e. climate (rainfall & temperature), topography (slope), soil chemical properties (PH & nutrients) and soil physical properties (depth, drainage & texture) were evaluated based on agronomist experts opinions and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) guideline for rain-fed agriculture. All data were stored in ArcGIS environment and the factor maps were generated. For MCE, Pair-wise Comparison Matrix known as Analytical Hierarchy Process (ARP) was applied and the suitable areas for rice crop were identified. To generate present land cover map, Landsat8 of May 2015 satellite image was classified using ERDAS Imagine by means of supervised classification. The results obtained indicate that 21.05% of the agricultural land is highly suitable for rice farming, 41.06% is moderately suitable and 18.46% is marginally suitable. These results imply that Kisumu County has more additional sites for rice farming which could sustain rice crop farming more effectively and efficiently and County Government of Kisumu can use this result to advice the local farmers on the suitable areas for rice planting.