**3. Methodology and data**

#### **3.1 Study site and study design**

The study was carried out in Uasin Gishu County; one of the 37 counties in Kenya. The county is made up of six sub counties namely:-Turbo, Soy, Moiben, Anapkoi, Kesses and Kapseret. According to [34], the total area of the County is 3327.8 Km2 with arable land covering 2603.2 Km2 and non-arable land covering *Integrating Local Farmers Knowledge Systems in Rainfall Prediction and Available Weather… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.96504*

682.6 Km2. The County extends between longitude 34° 50′ and 35 ° 37′ east and 0° 03′ and 0° 55′ north. The headquarters of Uasin Gishu County is Eldoret town located on the main highway serving Kenya, Uganda and other countries in the great lakes region areas that include Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, and stretching all the way to Cape Town in the Republic of South Africa. The town is located at an altitude of 2085 m above sea level with a relatively cool climate experiencing daily mean maximum temperatures of 23.7 ° C and a mean minimum of 9.5 ° C. Eldoret town is traversed approximately latitude 00° 30' North and Longitude 35° 15′ East of the Equator [35]. Uasin Gishu County is basically an agricultural district producing more than a third of the total wheat production in Kenya. Similarly, maize ranks second both as food and cash crop. A report compiled by [36] shows that the 2009 long rain maize production season was about 1.84 million Metric Tonnes, which was 28 percent below normal. There was a growing apprehension that the production could further be revised downwards due to insufficient and erratic rains in some parts of the main maize producing areas in North Rift including Uasin Gishu County due to the changing

#### **Figure 1.**

*Map of Uasin Gishu County showing the study area.*

climate. The crop production has never been steady with each year having different challenges related to rainfall variations hence impacting positively or negatively to overall maize and wheat production.

The study utilized both qualitative and quantitative techniques. The use of both quantitative and qualitative research techniques are known to complement each other especially where exploration of indigenous knowledge among farmers is important. The qualitative aspect helped consolidate the themes emerging from the interview or survey. The target population was all farmers engaged in maize and wheat production resident in Uasin Gishu County at the time of study. Because of its nature of utilizing both qualitative and quantitative techniques, a representative sample was picked considering the levels of stratifications. The sampling frame for the study was 129, 384 farmers distributed as follows: - Soy Sub-County = 61, 138, Moiben Sub-County = 38, 950 and Kesses Sub-County = 29, 296. A minimum of 399 farmers were included in the study. In addition 12 key informants were interviewed; one from each ward totalling to 9 and also 2 from Directorate of Agriculture and Directorate of Meteorology in Uasin Gishu County respectively. One other key informant from the Kenya Meteorological Services in Nairobi was interviewed as well. Purposive, stratified and random sampling procedure was adopted to be able to capture a representative sample of farmers and based on this criterion, 3 sub-counties of Moiben, Soy and Kesses were selected for exhibiting both maize and wheat production (**Figure 1**).
