Land suitability study for rice growing in Kisumu county

Best use of available land resources for long term agricultural practice for analysis is a basic necessity to attain optimum agricultural production. In Kenya, rice being among consumed food crops but with low production rate does not meet the demands; and to alleviate this deficit there is need to identify more sites to cultivate rice crop. In locating more sites for rice farming, climate, physical and soil factors were considered. The study seeks to create a GIS model for use in locating suitable sites for rice farming. In order to achieve this goal, both remote sensing, geographical information system (GIS) tools based on multi-criteria evaluation (MCE) approach and analytical hierarchy process (AHP) were employed. Criteria variables for calculating the weights are climate, topography, soil pH, soil nutrients, soil depth, soil drainage and soil texture based on agronomist experts’ opinions. The analysis was carried out using application of analysis tools in the ArcGIS and obtained results indicate that 21.05% of the agricultural land is highly suited for rice farming, 41.06% is moderately suitable and 18.46% is marginally suitable. The model developed if adopted could improve the planning, locating and precisely recognizing the additional sites for rice planting.