In Kenya, aquaculture has the potential to support local economic development in terms of addressing poverty, reducing food insecurity, and generating employment opportunities. The diversification that comes from integrating crops such as vegetables, mushrooms, and fish imparts stability in production, efficiency in resource use, and conservation of the environment. This system will generate synergies between crop byproducts, mushroom spent substrate as feed for fish and black soldier fly, pond sediments as crop fertilizer, and aquaculture wastewater for crop irrigation. Integrated agriculture-aquaculture systems (IAAS) can also provide other benefits, such as controlling pests and weeds and increasing resilience to climate change. Moreover, farmers with limited land, women, youth, and marginalized groups can be involved in such technologies and thereby increase the production and productivity of farming systems while enhancing environmental protection and water resource management. Therefore, the team proposes to use an integrated climate-smart aquaponic system to increase crop and fish production for improved food and nutrition security and livelihoods.
The Integrated Agri-Aquaculture Systems in Kenya team will innovatively integrate a climate-smart aquaponic system to produce fish, fish feed, fingerlings, mushrooms, and indigenous vegetables for improved food and nutrition security.
Activity objectives:
- Establish a locally produced integrated climate-smart aquaponic system to produce fish and evaluate feed with black soldier fly larvae meal.
- Integrate indigenous vegetables, compare mushroom substrates, and evaluate vegetable yields.
- Evaluate nutrition through dietary diversity for children under 5 years of age through production from the integrated aquaponic system.
- Support capacity building, gender equity, and social inclusion in resilient IAAS and nutrition.
Planned outcomes:
- Locally produced climate-smart aquaponic system.
- Increased fish, mushroom, and indigenous vegetable production.
- Low-cost and sustainable farm-produced fish feeds.
- Improved dietary diversity and nutrient intake for households and children under 5 years old.
- Capacity strengthening in IAAS for local stakeholders (farmers, women, youth, marginalized groups, and government departments).
- Gender equity and social inclusion in IAAS for women, youth, and marginalized groups.
The challenges in food production require innovative systems, methods, and practices, given that many people are already chronically malnourished. Increasing demand on water resources, reduced land and water availability, and concerns over food security have spurred the evolution of many innovative and complex food production systems. Integrated aquaponics emerges as a key technology with the potential to transform agriculture and enhance food security in the wake of climate change, particularly in arid regions. In the proposed aquaponics system, the research team aims to integrate a black soldier fly production unit as a sustainable fish feed, a fish hatchery unit for fingerlings production, and indigenous vegetables and mushroom production unit to further improve overall nutrition locally, especially for children, pregnant and lactating women, and marginalized groups. The major outputs/products will be fish, fish fingerlings, vegetables, mushrooms, low-cost fish feed, and food diversification with the IAAS products. Overall, the activity aims to improve food and nutrition security, livelihoods, enhance access to improved fish feed and stocks, and contribute to sustainable productivity, resilience to shocks and stresses, and sustainable aquatic resource management.
