In the 19th century, and during most of the 20th century, Northeast Tanzania was a region dominated by two distinct types of food producing landscapes – intensively cultivated areas and the pastoral grazing lands of the Maasai Plains. However, in the last few decades a new distinct pattern of land-use has developed in the region whereby large areas of the Maasai Plains have become extensively cultivated. In other parts of the world, as well as in other East African rangelands, rapid land-use change during the last few decades of the 20th century has usually been associated with the demands and opportunities of modernist development policies, pressures for increased productivity, rapid urbanization, land tenure reforms, population growth and increased commercial investments in agriculture – factors that have also dominated recent land change processes in northeast Tanzania. Hence, the relatively abrupt shift in land-use on the Maasai Plains, as documented by satellite image interpretations between the 1970s and 2000, closely follows an expected trajectory of rapid change based on the momentum of such recent driving forces, which in this case implies a conversion of large areas of pastoral rangelands and dry-land wood and bush savanna to a landscape dominated by agricultural production.