Land for Wildlife or Cattle – or Both

Interviewee

Ron Beaton

Founder of Olare Orok Conservancy & Koiyaki Guiding School

Interviewers

Alison M. Jones

NWNL Director and Photographer

Alison M. Fast

Videographer

At Topi House, in Olare Orok Conservancy, Kenya on Sept 25, 2009

Introductory Note

Ron Beaton has become a legend in Kenya’s story of blending high-quality tourism with conservation and respect for the rights and heritage of the Maasai.

Ron’s vision in the Maasai Mara has led to a new generation of Maasai involvement in tourism. Many Maasai Mara safari clients carry lifetime memories of their experiences at Ron Beaton’s Rekero Tented Camp on the Talek River, managed and hosted by his Maasai partner, Jackson Looseyia.

Ron’s ongoing development of ways to blend wildlife conservancies that produce tourism income with better livestock practices for the Maasai are out- of-the-box approaches. They hold the promise of blended opportunities for all.

Outline

RON BEATON’S CONCERNS
KOIYAKI GUIDING SCHOOL HELPS the MAASAI
EDUCATION on LAND & WATER CONSERVATION
CAN BONGO HELP SAVE THE MAU FOREST?
MORE WATER SOURCES & ENERGY NEEDED
MANAGING WILDLIFE & LIVESTOCK TOGETHER
COMMUNITY-BASED CONSERVANCIES

Key Quote Our main population down here in the Greater Mara is that of the Maasai. We are now teaching them new technologies for looking after their land so they get a more viable income from their land. Their land must incorporate eco-tourism and conservation, if it is to support them in the future. – Ron Beaton

RON BEATON’S CONCERNS

NWNL Ron, you are a legend in Kenya conservation – particularly in the Greater Maasai Mara region. I will leave you to identify your visions and sense of best options for the future of this region – as well as your goals and achievements thus far!

RON BEATON To begin, I’m one of the patrons of Koiyaki Guiding School, a capacity-building facility to train young Maasai women and men about their environment, tour-guiding and how to network a conservation message back to their families.

I also fundraise for other conservancies, which is another way to support these young, qualified safari guides. We also have a group offering wildlife-management training in the schools, which Maasai students transfer to their parents and relations, suggesting opportunities for them to become involved in community projects.

The Maasai culture has changed dramatically in the last 20 years, especially due to a huge increase in their population and thus in numbers of their cattle. The unfortunate correlation to that is the environment is being hammered and overutilized by too many livestock. As well, wood-lots are being destroyed; rivers and forests are being destroyed; and there is more of the inevitable erosion that occurs when droughts are followed by heavy rain.

For the last 20-30 years in East Africa, we’ve had tremendous droughts, normally followed by almost El Nino conditions, causing tremendous degradation to the environment, particularly where there has been over-grazing, so there’s no cover on the soil to hold the moisture.

NWNL So you have identified three major economies with specific impacts: agricultural effects on the river’s ecology, heavy grazing by Maasai cattle herds, and tourism. Basically, your two-fold focus seems to be on supporting the Maasai people and impacts on the environment. I assume those situations have spurred your dedication to the education the Maasai in the classroom about the environment.

KOIYAKI GUIDING SCHOOL HELPS the MAASAI

RON BEATON We have 3 main components that we really focus on through the Koiyaki Guiding School as a capacity-building facility that is training Maasai to become professional safari guides. Basically, their job will be to transfer information to tourists and create more awareness of this environment. The other component we teach is better land management and wildlife management. So, those are the three things we focus on – professional safari guiding, wildlife management and land management.

The original focus for the school was training safari guides in the tourism guiding, which in Kenya has been at a very low level for many years.

NWNL How do you envision the best approach to training safari guides?

RON BEATON In training professional safari guides who have come to our country, it is critical to instill an authentic insight into local Maasai culture and how it works with wildlife tourism. Koiyaki aims to produce the future guardians of community wildlife conservancies and land management. The latter is probably the most important component because local communities need the best source of income from their land that is compatible with eco-tourism and conservation.

Since we started the school in 2005, we have worked on quality rather than quantity. We only take 25 students a year, and they mainly go into the tourism industry at the moment. We’ve only just started wildlife management courses, because new community conservancies have a great need for wildlife management training.

Land management links in everything. We must create situations where Maasai landowners get the best possible income from their land. They won’t accept wildlife tourism if they don’t earn enough money from its use of their land.

So, we’re looking at forms of income compatible with conservation and eco-tourism. That includes beekeeping, baling and briquette-making in El Nino years of high grass yields. The briquettes produce energy so Maasai women can cook their food and serve as fodder for cattle. Grass can be stored for 5 years in huge round bales that probably weigh 90-100 kilos each. That fodder can be saved for times of need.

Kenya has one huge advantage in this scenario. If you had those goals in western Europe or much of the USA, you would have to have an integrated agricultural fertilization component.. But here, we have wildlife to do that job. Ever year the wildebeest migration fertilizes the Mara. We can take grass off 0,5% of the Mara in a wet year, although we can’t do that in dry years.

At the end of the wet season, grazing animals like Thompson gazelle, Grant’s gazelle and others have short plush grass to graze on. Predators that feed on those prey also have an area where they sustain themselves. Whereas if you don’t do that, you end up with traditional methods of grass control that burn huge areas when the ecosystem is susceptible to hot fires.

It’s important to utilize land in a way that will be beneficial to the people. That is what we’re looking at and experimenting with. We want to buy a round baler for all this grass and establish beekeeping, which is also compatible with eco-tourism and conservation.

Another goal is to convert Maasai women to using different forms of energy for cooking their food, like sun power or thermal stoves. We’d like to change the fact they waste most of the day carrying water and going to get firewood. We’d like to see them use firewood for only 20% of their cooking fuel. Energy. We’d like to help them cut down on the use of paraffin and other consumables that are not very compatible with conservation here in the Mara.

EDUCATION on LAND & WATER CONSERVATION

RON BEATON Other components we’re centralizing now under the umbrella of Koiyaki Guiding School are employing community officers – probably mostly women – to tutor traditional Maasai families on using other forms of energy that are more compatible with conservation. We’ve employed a community officer and already have 23 applicants. Best practices are all part of the education process. That includes using thermal stones, solar lights, and just to cut down carbonated products like charcoal and ordinary firewood being used which would aggravate degradation of the environment.

NWNL What are you doing vis a vis conservation of water resources? What challenges do you face in river-related issues and what practices need to be changed?

RON BEATON Indeed, we are teaching young Maasai about water conservation as it supports our efforts to reverse land degradation caused by a huge increase in the human population and the cattle population. This problem results in pastures being degraded, due in part by erosion from changed rainfall due to deforestation. Plus, the Mara River is drying up. The perennial rivers in the area are becoming practically extinct. I believe this can be reversed through Maasai education.

It is a huge problem here, as it is Tanzania. The Mara River bisects Serengeti National Park, feeding water into Lake Victoria and down the Nile, so this whole problem snowballs right through to Egypt. Egyptians are completely dependent on the Nile. So this whole problem is not just here in Kenya’s Maasai Mara. The problem relates to all our neighboring countries.

The combined land and forest degradation lowers the perennial rivers dramatically every year. So, we’re at sort of a knife edge. Something has got to be done now. The best way to do this, we feel, is through education of the young people. Through that education, they can transmit that information back to their parents and hopefully reverse this trend. Is that okay?

NWNL So your effort is to build education to stress new technologies.

CAN BONGO HELP SAVE THE MAU FOREST?

NWNL What are your thoughts about restoration of the Mau Forest, now so devastated by widespread and ongoing deforestation?

RON BEATON One of our main messages to the local Maasai people via our school is that they must protect their water towers, especially the Mau Forest – a traditional Maasai area. But in the Mau Forest, other tribes have moved into the forest illegally. Today’s local population must face the fact that squatters are imperiling the water tower for the Mara River. One way of rectifying this ongoing deforestation in the Mau Forest would be to introduce some high-profile projects that will create local income. One action could be reintroducing the now-endangered indigenous mountain bongo.

Susie Casanova is doing research for us on this. If we could safely guard the small remnants of the mountain bongo population there, tourism could be one solution for protecting the Mau Forest ecosystem. With 250,000 tourists coming to the Mara every year, it would be easy to market bongo tourism in the Mau Forest. It’s only 60 miles away. Obviously we can’t have 250,000 touring through the Mau, but we could have a high conservancy fee for the few who would still want to see bongos – just like those who pay large amounts to see gorillas. That income could be distributed to communities on the fringes of the Mau Forest, as well as to the government. Everybody would be happy.

NWNL That’s brilliant and makes sense if indeed bongo are still there.

RON BEATON A volunteer pilot flying a Mau Forest transect found 2 very small groups of bongo there. They’re probably still there, and we could reintroduce more. Tourism interest to go the Mau Forest would safeguard the small remnants of the Mau’s mountain bongo. The local communities would be happy for that type of tourism to happen.

MORE WATER SOURCES & ENERGY NEEDED

RON BEATON Here in the Greater Mara, the Maasai represent our main population. We are teaching them new technologies to protect their land so they get a more viable income from their land. If their land is to support them in the future, they must incorporate eco-tourism and conservancies,. Through the conservancies created on their community land, tourism raises money to supply easier clean water access by digging boreholes [wells].

NWNL Regarding access to water supplies, is there a way to relieve the heavy work done by Maasai women? How much time do Maasai women spend collect water? What are current issues related to water availability and can they be improved?

RON BEATON Most Maasai woman spend probably 80% of every day collecting water and firewood. We can change that scenario through better technology and offering clean water from boreholes. That gives them more time to put towards other income-earning industries such as bee keeping, bead making, etc. It’ll give them a “bigger pot” to support their families. When I say a “bigger pot,” I mean spreading the eggs – that is, their time – around in four or five baskets instead of having them all in one basket.

NWNL That is appealing to those of us aware of their burdens.

RON BEATON Yes. The women go out and milk the cattle. They feed the kids, and then in big teams they go out to cut firewood, sometimes ten kilometers away. When they return and deposit their firewood, they take 20-liter jerry cans to a water source – often a puddle full of typhoid and God knows what. They carry that water back and consume it, although not boiled.

Their lives are very basic. The Maasai need better systems and education. Education is the key to everything. The young people are smart and can operate a computer in 3 to 4 days, whereas it took me months! They’re very smart young people. They can absorb our technology very quickly. We must quickly help them absorb new technology and take it back to their families to help ease their daily lives and burdens.

NWNL What are your thoughts about biogas as a replacement for fuel wood?

RON BEATON Biogas is a great form of energy, but its disadvantage is in the capital costs of setting it up. It certainly can be done in time, when there is income to do so. But probably in the interim period, briquettes are the best answer. They are a mixture of cow dung and grass. There’s plenty of grass here at certain times of the year to be harvested! That would be a non-carbon form of energy. Again, the use of briquettes needs training in combination with solar stoves to work well.

MANAGING WILDLIFE & LIVESTOCK TOGETHER

NWNL I’ve often heard, “Livestock go here; and wildlife go there.” But now I hear new concepts. What’s your opinion? What motivated this new approach?

RON BEATON This is all sub-divided, private land. It’s no longer community land.

You’ve just interviewed Tarquin Wood, our neighbor and a large-scale farmer. His idea is to have commercial herds owned by conservancies, rather than individuals. That requires educating individual Maasai landowners to have communal herds. There are problems involved with that.

You would probably allocate 25% of the conservancy at any one time to that herd and develop a rotation system. They’re kept in stockades and thus are protected at night. But that will be quite difficult to introduce immediately, because most Maasai families need milk. So, they tend to have mixed herds of beef animals and milk the calves.

Most of Koiyaki is now subdivided into 60 hectares of land, each owned by a registered individual who is a family head. In this new environment, livestock are not going to work on only 60 hectares of land.

So, they must put that land into an association or a conservancy, managed ultimately by young students from Koiyaki Guiding School who can set up the best form of land use.

We must accept that certain areas of Maasai land should be agricultural – to be a form of land income. Now, whether there is sufficient land will determine if that could be an option, but most of it does not have enough rainfall to sustain cash crops. In any way, the Maasai people are not traditionally agriculturalists. They’re pastoralists. So, they will adapt far better to a combination of livestock production and conservation tourism, wildlife tourism.

We also must work at government level to try and get the Wildlife Act changed in this country, because currently all wildlife belongs to the government. Yet, we could be adding tremendous value to this land if we could capture and export wildlife.

Here’s an example: a South Sudan game reserve wants antelopes we have, including waterbuck, topi and tiang [a subspecies of topi].. We should be able to sell them to Sudan, with quotas and under government stewardship. We could capture some of this game and export it to other areas in Africa to restock their conservancies. Basically, the law must be changed to accommodate that.

The MP [Member of Parliament] was here recently talking about these concepts we’ve just discussed.. But he doesn’t have the background or vision to push something like that forward. One only understands such proposals if one has traveled and been exposed to other Western economies. So, we’re back to education again, aren’t we? We keep coming back to education at the end of the day. That’s what we’ve got to focus on.

COMMUNITY-BASED CONSERVANCIES

NWNL Ron, you’re aware of the success of the Mara Conservancy and are now involved in establishing other such conservancies. What are your experiences with this approach of conservation?

RON BEATON The system in Laikipia, north of Nairobi, is also a great model. Locally, Narok Conservancy is not big. It’s split into 60-hectare plots. Now we are in the process of setting up Naiboisho Conservancy. It covers 18,000 hectares, and it has 457 landowners.

NWNL What are the management issues you face with Naiboisho?

RON BEATON When we form a Conservancy, we give them guaranteed rent. For instance, in this Olare Orok Conservancy, no cattle are allowed in the core. We do allow certain incursions of cattle if there is a drought – as we have now. However, in a normal year, no cattle for the core area.

Landowners are annually paid 3,000 shillings per hectare. Whether one tourist comes through, or 1000 tourists come, landowners get a guaranteed income – and it’s a very nice income. So, 3,000 shillings from a 60-hectare plot of land is 180,000 shillings a year, or 15,000 shillings a month. That’s a very good salary. It’s what you’d pay a tractor driver.

Maasai pastoralists here get the same salary as a truck driver from his own land with no outlay – a guaranteed income, in exchange for our accommodating a certain amount of cattle that won’t degrade the land when let in on a rotational basis. That’s what’s happens in northern Kenya with Northern Rangeland Trust. Yet it is a bit different here, because all that land in the Northern Rangeland Trust is communal land, so there is a committee. Here we would sign leases.

NWNL Ron, you have shared so much information. Thank you for all that you have done for this very special corner of Africa. And thank you for sharing your conservation philosophy with us, as well as thoughts related to improving management of critical land and water resources.

Posted by NWNL on July 1, 2024.
Transcription edited and condensed for clarity by Alison M. Jones.

Land for Wildlife or Cattle – or Both Mara River Basin