There is little evidence and information regarding animal breeding programs that
allow priority setting that is driven by cattle keepers’ preferred traits. Yet, their participation
may contribute to development of sustainable breeding programs. This paper aims to fill this
gap by deriving economic values for cattle traits in pastoral and crop-livestock production
systems in eastern Africa, using choice experiments. The focus is on farmer preferences for
trypanotolerance, relative to other traits which could be introduced through breeding
programs that utilize resistant genotypes. The rest of the paper is organized as follows.
Section 2 presents a brief description of the characteristics of the study sites, while section 3
provides a background on choice experiments as well as a description of the process used to
collect the choice experiment data and the estimation methods. The empirical results are
discussed in section 4 and concluding remarks presented in section 5.
2. Study Area
Spatial mappings of tsetse fly distribution in Kenya and Ethiopia was done as an initial
attempt at targeting research areas with trypanosomosis challenge, given that the major
pathogenic trypanosome species in livestock are transmitted by the tsetse fly. Two districts,
Suba and Narok were then selected in Kenya to represent crop-livestock systems and pastoral
systems respectively. In Ethiopia, the study was carried out in Ghibe valley, a trypanosomosis
prevalent area where crop-livestock production system is predominant. Pastoral systems are
characterized by low input management for the cattle enterprise; large cattle herd sizes of
about 72 animals per household and practice of some level of semi-nomadism. Livestock are
moved based on seasonal rotation in search of water and pasture. No crop production is
undertaken due to the harsh agro-climatic conditions. Land ownership is predominantly in the
form of communal group ranches. In crop-livestock systems, both crop and livestock
production takes place. There exist strong crop-livestock interactions in this system. Cattle act
as agricultural inputs in crop production, in terms of provision of draught power for ploughing