International aid agencies say global food security is one of the biggest issues the world is facing. In the east African nation of Tanzania, farmers are desperate to work their way out of poverty to offer their children a better life.
It is a sea of blue and red that stretches across the plains. Men and their cattle have walked for hours to be here.
Few are speaking, instead opting for hand gestures.
These cattlemen are here for the twice-weekly sales in Meserani village, a small town in the east African nation of Tanzania.
With the flick of a wrist the deal is sealed, the cattle exchanged and they head off to their new homes.
These sales in the country's north are the second largest in Tanzania.
"We sell everywhere, even [to] Nairobi," Alex Meliyo says.
"We can take the cows from here to Nairobi for eight days walking."
Meliyo isn't here to sell today.
He's standing in the middle of the market with six coloured cloths wrapped around his body.
As he walks around he carries in his left hand a club he carved out of wood.
His other hand is sporting a spear as long as he is.
On his feet are sandals he's sculpted out of tyre rubber.
"Maybe I will sell cattle if I have [school fees to pay]," he says.
"Or [if I need] some money for a circumcision or for the ceremony or for marrying."
The Masai are some of Tanzania's poorest people and, as lingering dry conditions devastate industries across the north, there are fears for their future.
But in a country where almost 80 per cent of people work in agriculture, those fears are shared on a much larger scale.
For the Masai tribesmen, whose semi-nomadic lifestyle is shaped around animals, their very culture is intrinsically linked to the arid landscape they roam.
At the same time, farmers are struggling to convince the next generation to battle on against and unforgiving Mother Nature.
The forward thinkers realise change is the only way ahead and countries like Australia could hold the answer to their survival.
A woman's place
The role of women within Tanzania is perplexing.
The culture is undoubtedly male dominated.
Masai men speak openly about how they sleep with their friend's wife when he leaves the village to take his cattle away to graze.
The man will leave his spear outside the hut, a sign not to disturb what's happening inside.
The Masai is a polygamist culture, something which Meliyo has absolutely embraced with his two wives and eight daughters.
"I want to increase the number of wives because we are polygamist," he says.
"Because the Masai take the kids as a part of their richness, so if you have a big number of kids you are a rich man."
Women get little say in who they marry.
Typically, a man will offer the woman's father cattle to secure a marriage.
The same men dictate that a woman must be circumcised in order to get married.
But they're not alone.
For a boy to become a man he must also be circumcised - a ritual that will involve a cow's blood.
"Every man in Masai, they should get circumcised," Meserani Masai Babu Saimalie says.
"If you are not, you cannot stay with the Masai community."
When a boy turns 15 he is ready to become a man - a process that started five years earlier when he received a knife for his circumcision.
The family will invite relatives and friends for a week of rituals and ceremonies.
After the procedure, the boys, which are covered in tribal paint, drink blood from a cow, goat or sheep to replenish blood lost during the circumcision.
Drinking blood is also common after a woman gives birth to a child.
The tribes will also mix blood with milk and drink it or mix it with maize flour and eat it.
To pay for these ceremonies, a man will sell about 10 cows.
It'll cost him about five more to secure a wife.
Further east along the Tanzania-Kenya border there's something of a revolution underway.
Elinduma Ng'unda is sitting in a white plastic chair.
She's wearing a vibrant orange dress with yellow, blue and green detailing.
The women around her are more simply dressed in orange and brown skirts and a white or pink dress shirt.
Everyone refers to Ng'unda as Bibi - Swahili for grandmother.
In 1997, she created a dairy co-operative that would go on to overhaul the lives of the women standing alongside her today.
The Marukeni Women's Dairy Co-operative, which sits near the foothills of the Kilimanjaro National Park, started with just 17 members.
Today, the membership is closer to 400.
The co-op's members typically have just one or two cows, which they hand-milk about 10 litres each a day.
Some will walk for hours to deliver their milk in traditional metal dairy containers to the processor.
"Our future is to promote women and their children to get their education up to high school," Bibi says through a translator.
"[If they get] to university [it will produce] better Tanzanian people."
Bibi glows as members like Anna Urassa tell their story.
Urassa is a mother of two and full-time school teacher.
Each night, she returns home from work and looks after her cows.
"[I do it] to support my children's private schooling," Urassa says.
"My salary was not enough to pay for them and to care for them at home.
"Therefore I started this project in order to support my life."
As the co-op has grown larger, so has its contribution to the region.
It pays for the schooling of orphans, some of which have gone onto university.
"We want the future of the ladies and women of Tanzania to come up independently," co-op chairwoman Stella Kileo says.
"And to be active through our co-operative and other things so we can grow and be good women of Tanzania."
Kileo is proud that women are driving a movement that's enhancing children's lives.
But she's more restrained when it comes to criticising men within the community.
"We are both working, not only the woman," she says with a loud giggle at the suggestion that women are doing all the work.
Owning the farm
Driving around northern Tanzania, you could be forgiven for thinking the men are banned from touching farm equipment.
Some of the most physical farm labouring appears to be the realm of women while men watch on either sitting on the ground or standing off to the side.
But while the women are doing the work, owning the farm is a different matter.
"Many women are participating in agriculture but [most] are just doing casual work," Josepha Pius says through a translator.
"Very few are owning and very few are running farms themselves."
Pius has been growing rice for more than 30 years.
She took over ownership when her husband died.
In the fields she's surrounded by men and boys throwing clumps of fertiliser into the crops.
There are strings with bells throughout the fields that people will pull to scare birds away.
Sitting in the rice fields are enclosed bamboo platforms.
Farmers will sleep in these overnight, getting up to scare away pests, birds, and wild animals.
"Coming at night here, it's not easy," Pius says.
"It is scary for women."
Tanzanian Bureau of Statistics figures show that 75.9 per cent of people work in agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting.
But going forward, farmers like Pius expect this number will drop, particularly if her children are anything to go by.
"I'm training them in doing agriculture," she says.
"But they are not willing."
Education providers like the government's Livestock Training Agency struggle to recruit female students.
Changes to skew the selection process in favour of female applications and offering child caring services are making small inroads into boosting female student numbers.
Rose Tarimo, who like Pius took over the family business when her husband died, thinks young people, particularly women, overlook a career in agriculture.
She runs a coffee roasting business that exports its beans around the globe.
The company also supplies the domestic market with an instant coffee product produced at its Moshi warehouse at the rear of Tarimo's residential compound.
"I would advise the young ladies not to see just the office work like secretaries or directors," Tarimo says.
"They should also come to the market, come to the agricultural side.
The Kilimanjaro region is renowned for the coffee it produces.
But price volatility and a lack of industry support has forced farmers to diversify into other crops, like maize, beans and bananas.
Farmers in this region want greater support from governments to access fertilisers and agronomic advice.
They also want greater access to trade across the border into Kenya, where farmers can earn more money from their crops.
Farmers like sweet potato grower Steven Misigaro say they have few options but to continue farming but they doubt their children will follow in their footsteps on the farm.
Misigaro says the hours he spends tending to arid paddocks each day is done so with his children in mind.
"I do this because I want my life to be better," he says.
"I have five children.
"These children need education.
"[I need] a lot of money to [keep] my children at school."
Australian technology helping Tanzanian agriculture
Broad acre farming is one of the country's industries that has received much needed support in recent years.
With the assistance of international companies, particularly from Europe, farmers have gained access to technology developed in Australia during the drought.
Ray Travas and his family have been dry land farming near Arusha, in northern Tanzania, since the 1970s.
The family grows beans, barley, safflower and maize with conservation tillage techniques it adopted eight years ago.
Travas is surprised that more farmers haven't followed his family's path.
"It's strange," he says.
"They've seen the results but when we tell them they should follow it, they still [don't], it's a cultural problem.
"[Their techniques] have been passed through [from] their predecessors, [they think] that they should do it that way and that's what they've been doing.
"They're really scared to change."
Dutch company Quality Food Products runs a warehouse in Arusha that works with Travas and other farmers throughout the region.
The company's managing director Ekko Oosterhuis says the bulk of conservation tillage machinery his company imports comes from Australia.
He says getting the machinery to Tanzania is straightforward, financing it is the problem.
Oosterhuis says changing techniques often means growers take a financial hit in the early years, something few farmers are happy to do given their margins are so low.
But he fears Tanzanian farmers face a bleak future if they don't modernise.
"The weather is getting more irrational," he says.
"We're getting maybe the same amount of rainfall but it's more erratic.
"We get bigger showers and longer droughts.
"So zero-till and keeping your crop residue is the only way people can actually still keep a margin in crop farming.
"Otherwise it's going to die out and soon I think you'll find people with the conventional system they will not be able to make margins and they'll fade out.
"I think in the next 10 years it's going to be a huge change here."
New and old cultures collide
It's not just the environment that's conspiring against farmers like Travas.
You regularly see young Masai boys walking alone with livestock herds throughout the country's north.
They carry a club and watch as the animals attempt to graze on the limited growth poking through the dry dirt.
The skeleton of emaciated animals is visible through the thin skin that covers their fatless bodies.
Their search for food is a headache for Travas.
The cattle stomp on his land causing compaction issues that limit his ability to use new farming methods.
They also eat his crop, essentially swallowing his income.
"We have a problem with the neighbouring cattle that come into the fields at night," Travas says.
"It's a big problem to get rid of them.
"The minute you go and chase them out they'll come to attack you.
"The police don't do much so we don't get much help from the government.
"Some people have even tried fencing their farms but then they break the fences and put the cattle in so it's a big problem."
The Masai tribes are unapologetic for the impact they have on farms
They argue they have a right to roam the country, keeping their ancestor's culture alive.
But Babu Saimalie worries his culture faces a bleak future if the climate continues to work against them.
"With climate change Masai have suffered a lot because they depend on cattle," he says.
"If there is no water, no grasses, Masai have suffered a lot because they didn't get enough food.
"There's no water, no milk.
"The cattle, when you skin them, the meat...that's useless.
"[With] climate change, Masai suffered a lot because men go far away, leaving their wives, to make sure that they will get a good place which can satisfy their cattle to do well."
As for his future, Saimalie's unsure if he'll arrange a second marriage.
He has just one wife and four children.
Together they care for 50 cows, 50 goats and more than 20 sheep.
He just hopes a salvation will come to keep his cattle alive and his children fed.
"I hope the educated people are going to try to [look after] livestock," Saimalie says.
"They don't have a special area which you can feed them and get their needs.
"They should plan how to improve them."