Innovations and remaining gaps in agricultural technology for smallholder farmers in Africa
Abstract
Environmental, disease, and population pressures are leading to increasing and new agriculture dependencies on technological advances. A portion of the global data-driven agricultural revolution must promote sustainable development for smallholder farmers in low-income regions. Like the leapfrog from no-phone, past the landline, to the mobile phone, there is an opportunity for agricultural technology to proceed from manual to state-of-the-art solutions. While there are similarities in the roots of technology used in low- and high-income regions, smallholder farmer use cases and constraints can require targeted redesign.
This presentation will include examples of current technology available to smallholder farmers in Africa, including soil, pest and disease diagnostics leveraging low-cost equipment and machine learning algorithms. These tools promote appropriate agrochemical application, reducing negative environmental and human health impacts. The discussion of remaining gaps will focus on water access for irrigation. The pervasive yield gap due to water stress across much of Africa presents an opportunity for intentionally balancing irrigation development with sustainable water management. Coupling novel pump technologies with decision support tools integrating hydrologic, agronomic, economic, and weather information, could help farmers and financial institutions decide where to invest in irrigation. In this case and many others, technology can fill the understaffed role of expert agronomist to guide smallholder farmers towards environmentally and economically sustainable practices.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.B31E..09R
- Keywords:
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- 0402 Agricultural systems;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0480 Remote sensing;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 1926 Geospatial;
- INFORMATICS;
- 1942 Machine learning;
- INFORMATICS