On a scorching day in Njoro Mata, Kenya, a farmer inspects elephant damage to her smallholding.
Monicah Muthike Moki’s property in southern Kenya, near Mount Kilimanjaro, has been overrun by Kenya’s legendary giants. Cassava, maize, bananas, sugarcane, and mangos are among the crops grown by the 48-year-old single mother of three.
Elephants have been damaging her crops since she began utilizing new farming methods recommended by the Kenya Red Cross Society. Ms. Moki said that elephants come every day from Tsavo National Park, which has 15,000 elephants and is one of the world’s largest wildlife reserves.
Elephants, she claims, leap the fence when herders cut it to get access to park meadows for their livestock.
Following years of insufficient rainfall, pastoralists are scrambling to feed their livestock, while elephants have started to move farther out for food. Climate change and drought in Kenya have altered animal behavior, leading to conflict with people.
Elephant crop-raiding is “very painful” for Ms. Moki.
Elephants are described as “bold” and “not afraid” by her. At night, they raid in herds, pairs, or lone elephants with calves. Elephants ate her harvests of maize, bananas, and cassava. Ms. Moki sleeps in a small house near her fields in case elephants come calling.
The elephants leave nothing
She should have five to six 90kg bags of grain ready to sell at the Taveta market for 6,500 Kenyan shillings ($48; £38). Without her crops, Ms. Moki cannot feed her family or sell her harvests to pay her 10-year-old daughter’s school tuition. Her rural farmers use grain sacks as security deposits or to pay for their children’s school fees. Corn is fed to students in schools.
Four-year-olds are now required to walk up to 4km (2.5 miles) home from school for lunch and back again in the afternoon. The largest terrestrial species devour 150kg for three-quarters of the day. According to Ms. Moki, they leave nothing.
Elephants need 100 liters of water per day, thus she drinks farm water from the local government.
Ms. Moki employs bright lights, loud noises, and other inventive tactics to keep elephants away from her fields.
She scatters old water and oil bottles with wires about the land in the hopes that elephants would rattle them and she will be able to climb up.
“I climb a ladder, flash my light towards them, and make noise because you cannot approach elephants,” the farmer adds.
Ms. Moki has her own alarm system for animals. She sleeps alone on the farm, waiting for jerrycans or dogs. Her inventive measures fail to deter the elephants, but they do alert her to their presence.
Elephants are quite dangerous.
“If an elephant hurts, injures, or kills me, my family will suffer,” says Ms Moki. Jonathan Mulinge, a farmer and father of four, claims to have had a near-death encounter with an elephant.
He tried to stop one from destroying his crops, but it charged. “The only thing that saved my life was being able to outrun the elephant and run into my house,” he says. Mr. Mulinge refers to this as a “conflict between us, the humans, and the elephant,” with farmers like him bearing the brunt of the costs.
“You plant your crops in order to benefit from them, and then the elephants come and destroy them, and the farmers are back to square one.”
According to Joram Oranga of the Kenya Red Cross Society, climate change’s arid conditions, lack of rainfall, and variable weather patterns foster human-elephant conflict for water and land resources, which will only become “worse” in the future.
Ms. Moki’s mental health is suffering as a result of this conflict and her extreme sleep deprivation.
