Assessment of land use land cover change and its implications on Agricultural Land: case study; Kiminini Sub-County in Trans Nzoia County, Kenya

Abstract

Trans Nzoia County is commonly known as Kenya‟s bread basket due to large scale production of maize and seeds. The weather conditions and soil are favourable for agricultural production and more specifically maize, which is Kenya‟s staple food. However, past reports have showed that maize production in Kenya have been on a spiral fall in recent years forcing the government to import from neighbouring countries to cover up for the deficit. The spiral fall in production is as a result of increased population which has led to land use land cover change and subdivision of agricultural lands to smaller uneconomic units. This research project focussed on the use of GIS and remote sensing tools to analyse and detect changes in land use land cover and its implications on agricultural land in Kiminini Sub-county. The approach used, entailed the analysis of Landsat satellite images for the past 20 years with the support of ancillary data to help establish and detect changes in land use land cover. Landsat satellite images obtained for analysis were for the years 2000, 2010 and 2020, where multispectral images from the Earth Thematic Mapper (ETM+), Thematic Mapper (TM) and Operational Land Imager (OLI) were used respectively. The research utilized ArcGIS and QGIS software‟s analysis tools to perform supervised and unsupervised classification of the satellite images. The analysis outputs revealed that agricultural land increased from 19729 Ha in the year 2000 to 32468 Ha in the year 2010. At the same time forested area dropped from 11236 Ha in the year the 2000 to 1143 Ha in the year 2010. The increase of 64.57% in agricultural land during these periods is attributed to the fact that more forested lands were converted to agricultural land. The research also revealed that agricultural land had reduced between the year 2010 and 2020 from 32468 Ha to 23542 Ha. The decline of 27.49% was as a result of factors such as urbanization, increased population and low economic returns from agriculture among others. The research recommends the need for formulation and enforcement of land use policies that would protect against the various causes of land use land cover change. The drastic decline in agricultural land according to past studies poses a serious risk to food production and food security for poor countries experiencing rise in population. Land use policies should be formulated against the loss of agricultural land as a result of excessive land subdivision and the conversion of agricultural land to other land uses. Adopting modern technologies in GIS and remote sensing would allow for formulation of informed policies as they will ensure regular updates of land use plans and constant monitoring against land use land cover change.