1 Published in Society & Natural Resources (2013) DOI:10.1080/08941920.2013.791901 From cattle to corn: attributes of emerging farming systems of former pastoral nomads in East Pokot, Kenya Clemens Greiner a , Miguel Alvarez b , Mathias Becker b a Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, University of Cologne, Germany b Institute of Crop Science and Resource Conservation, Agricultural Faculty, University of Bonn, Germany Clemens Greiner is a Post-Doctoral researcher at the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, University of Cologne. His research focuses on land-use change, conflict and the transformation of social-ecological systems in the Central Rift Valley, Kenya, and on rural-urban migration and translocality in Southern and Eastern Africa. Miguel Alvarez is a Post-Doctoral researcher in the Vegetation Science group of the Institute of Crop Science and Resource Conservation at the University of Bonn. He studies plant species and vegetation formations under changing land-use systems in East Africa and South America. Mathias Becker is Professor for Plant Nutrition in Bonn with a longstanding experience (12 years’ work in the CGIAR in Asia and Africa) of the study of nutrient fluxes and the characterization of African and Asian in land use systems. Currently, he coordinates several interdisciplinary research projects on rice-based systems in Asia and changing land use systems in Africa. Acknowledgements Many thanks go to Dominika Schneider and Christian Dold for their participation in the field survey and soil and vegetation sampling in 2011, and to three anonymous referees whose comments helped a lot to improve this article.