Weather data, birds and crickets combine to guide African farmers
T WAS in Mbeere, in rural Kenya, where Muthoni Masinde began to pick up on nature’s way of signposting shifting weather patterns as she helped her mother farm their land.
She learned that if thick swarms of crickets appeared in the evenings during planting season, it meant the rains were about to end – a sign that farmers should stop planting because their seeds would not germinate.
If farmers could hear the bird known locally as kivuta mbura – “the one that pulls the rains” – they should expect heavy rain for several hours afterwards.
Studies in computer science soon took Masinde away from rural life, but she never forgot the value farmers placed on observing the environment and its rhythms to grow their crops.
Using her expertise in computer science, Masinde has now developed a tool to make predicting drought easier for Africa’s small-scale farmers by combining traditional knowhow with scientific weather data. Predictions “I was motivated by the realisation that in most African countries, rain-fed agriculture still accounted for over 70 percent of food production,” Masinde told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The mobile application, which has been tested in Mozambique, Kenya and KwaZuluNatal in South Africa, works by pooling information on rainfall, temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure and other climatic indicators.
Observations are collected from conventional weather stations and smaller, cheaper sensor-based stations that can be deployed in large numbers to give better coverage and more accurate results.
Farmers feed their observations into a cellphone.
“With all this data, computer science models are used to predict drought for the short, medium and long term,” said Masinde, now a senior lecturer and head of the IT department at the Central University of Technology in the Free State.
Farmers were consulted to merge the technical information with their own forecasts before it was widely distributed, she explained.
The information is simplified and disseminated to small- scale farmers via SMS and audio files in easy-to-understand messages, such as: “There will be adequate rain during the first two weeks of the season; you are advised to plant early to take advantage of this rainfall.”
The World Bank says that in sub-Saharan Africa agriculture accounts on average for 35 percent of total gross domestic product and employs 70 percent of the region’s population. More than 95 percent of the region’s agricultural areas depend on rainfall rather than irrigation.
Many African farmers still use knowledge passed down through generations to guide them on when, how and what to plant. But such traditional know-how is becoming increasingly unreliable in the face of climate change, which has disrupted the seasons and led to longer droughts, greater flooding and erratic rainfall. With all this data, computer science models are used to predict drought for the short, medium and long term.