NAIROBI, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- The chaff-cutter on the farm in Kajiado County, south of Kenya's capital Nairobi, rotates at greater speed as it chops dry grass into tiny pieces.

Standing on the side feeding the machine the grass is a lanky man, who does the job faster to ensure he keeps up with the speed of the machine. Another worker collects the chopped grass and takes it to a cowshed hosting some 15 dairy cows where it is mixed with molasses and fed to the animals.

"We grow the Rhodes grass during the rainy season, harvest, dry and store it for the rainy day. This is what we use during the dry season and it saves us a lot since the rains have become too erratic," farm manager Paul Sosoika told Xinhua in an interview.

The growing and storage of the improved grass breed is one of the climate-smart measures east African nation farmers have adopted. The other one is making silage and storing it in a bunker for use in times of scarcity. The two are some of the climate mitigation measures that have spread at the grassroots in Kenya as the effects of climate change unfold in the country.

With many citizens witnessing the weather becoming erratic, changing farming seasons and an increase in pests and diseases, spreading the knowledge about climate change has become an easy task for campaigners. "It is no longer harder to convince farmers, for instance, to grow trees around their farms as a climate mitigation measure because people are seeing the challenges arising from the weather," said Beatrice Macharia, an agronomist with Growth Point, an agro-consultancy in Kajiado.

The grassroots climate measures are, however, not only being done by individuals but also county governments, which are turning them into policy.

Makueni County is one of the devolved units in the east African nation with the most progressive grassroots climate mitigation measures. The county government has allocated 1 percent of its total development budget to climate change mitigation. This is being done by mainstreaming its climate change regulations into a development plan.

Lydia Muithya, a climate grassroots leader in Makueni County, said recently that with climate change, top-down solutions cannot work. "Various communities and individuals have their own needs depending on how climate change is affecting them. Thus, communities are in place to know what to do at the grassroots," she said, adding climate-smart mitigation measures have caught on.

She noted that many communities in Kenya are coming up with intervention measures and are owning them. "The place of the communities at the grassroots is to prioritize which interventions to implement. They thus own the initiatives and make them sustainable," she said.

Some of the interventions most communities in Kenya have adopted include growing climate-smart crops like sorghum, short-season plants like traditional vegetables and the introduction of community radios to disseminate climate information.

"We get all the information about the weather, what to plant and when to harvest our crops from our community radio station," said Juma Wandera, a resident of Budalangi, a flood-prone area in Busia County, western Kenya.

According to Michael Okumu, deputy director of climate change negotiations and finance, in Kenya's Ministry of Environment, Kenya has a progressive legislative framework that encourages grassroots climate action.

Okumu noted that Kenya in 2010 created its national climate response strategy, which over the years has been trickled down to the grassroots. Enditem

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