May 5, 2009
At the recent CSI-AGCommons-WhereCampAfrica event in Nairobi we interviewed some of the participants to get their perspectives on why maps are important, on their role in the response to climate change, on their use in recent crises….
Why maps? is a video produced by a Nairobi-based crew to help highlight the value of geospatial technology in agriculture.
May 2, 2009
I am doing it again…giving titles that sound like an Aesop’s fable….just like my earlier “The Starfish and the Spider” post. But again, this has nothing to do with the more famous fables…. This is about applying map technology to reduce a public-health menace. After all this is a blog about ICTs, knowledge and agriculture…
Sibiry Traore
Ok….let’s see what our conversation with Pierre Sibiry, research scientist at ICRISAT in Mali during our First Africa Geospatial week reveals…
“You don’t have to describe to a child what an elephant is when he can see one.” Pierre borrows this Dagaare proverb from Ghana to explain the sheer visual power of maps.
On the other hand, he is also quick to admit not understanding, just yet, why West African farmers are captivated by digitized, very high resolution maps of their land.
“We don’t know why they like this imagery,” says Traore, “but they seem to love it. They all ask for it. Why not provide very high-resolution imagery everywhere for rural communities? You could map villages, fields, trees, cart paths, landscapes. You could have every mayor, village chief, farmers’ representative discuss local maps with local people and see what happens.
“Ever wondered why you stare at your own backyard on Google Earth? Well, the farmer might just be like you – or vice versa. There is no reason to deprive the majority of Africans of that imagery.”
One unpredicted effect of maps on Traore himself has been a growing interest in aflatoxins—toxic substances produced by the Aspergillus fungi that infest peanuts and other crops. Aflatoxins are among the most potent carcinogens known, and particularly affect the liver.
“I recently read that one in ten males in the Gambia die from liver cancer. Isn’t that shocking? West Africans eat a lot of peanuts—a majorl source of protein and energy. In addition, you find aflatoxin in weaning formulas and milk when cows are fed infected peanuts—it causes stunting and other child health problems.”
So what does this have to do with maps?
Weather and field conditions control how quickly the fungus grows in any particular harvest. And these environmental and management conditions can be monitored by satellite.
“It turns out that peanut pods are particularly susceptible if they matured during a dry spell – weaker shells allow the fungus in. But also if they sit on the ground after harvesting when it’s damp—then the fungus just explodes. Quite often you can see the fungus in the peanut shell—a green powdery stuff. But it doesn’t have to be visible to be dangerous.”
Some weather satellites can help predict harvest time and moisture levels. Combined with very high-resolution imagery—satellite pictures that allow you to zoom in very close and see inside fields, they help tell whether a particular field has a high, medium, or low risk of aflatoxin in the harvest. That means they show critical places where farmers should rush the crop off the field to dry.
Resistant varieties are in development. In the meantime, the most important defense is not to let the crop sit on the ground in damper than average conditions.
“It’s not that the farmers leave them there out of neglect. Peanuts often come last. Cotton can’t stand in the field or it gets ruined—and it’s cash so it’s more urgent. After that comes millet and sorghum, since they’re staples for family. Then you can turn your attention to the peanuts.”
Most in West Africa simply have no idea of the dangers of aflatoxin.
“Aflatoxin is like tobacco—you usually don’t see the effects till many years later. In Kenya in 2004, about 130 people died from eating contaminated maize. But the bigger impact is chronic exposure. It’s well documented in the medical literature, but the problem is hugely underestimated in Africa. Aflatoxin delays development. And it’s a silent killer..”
With luck and funding, that particular elephant might be tamed.
April 28, 2009
Using satellite imagery for counting crop acreage
A conversation with Lieven Claessens, of the International Potato Center
Sweet Potato
Yes, district officers estimate acreage devoted to various items. But how good are those estimations?
CIP, the International Potato Centre, promotes sweet potato for its high Vitamin A content and other nutrients. CIP wanted to know how much sweet potato was being planted by farmers in eastern Uganda.
So they developed a way to use satellite imagery to peer closely into fields. Until recently, most thought it wouldn’t be possible to differentiate food crops in a complex farming system. But for this project researchers tuned the satellite cameras to pick up not what the human eye would see–a tangle of green—but wavelengths we can’t see, mostly “infrared.”
Satellite images of infrared are similar the infrared film you (or more likely your parents) may have experimented with in the ’60s or ’70s– trees and grass came out in reds and violets.
Each species reflects its own “signature” colour. Using a hand-held sensor, researchers figure out what that colour is, for, say, sweet potato, as well as crops planted next to or near it, so they can differentiate them. Then they check for those colours in the satellite images.
The result? According to CIP researcher Lieven Claessens,“We discovered that only 63 percent of sweet potatoes in the field showed up in the national statistics. In other words, sweet potatoes were undercounted by nearly 40 percent.”
Improving the accuracy of counting by such a large percentage could be a boon to agriculture researchers worldwide. One more win for “the eye in the sky.”
April 20, 2009
Andy Jarvis
Q: You say you have two “mantras.” What are they?
A: One is “crop wild relatives.” (Note: A crop wild relative (CWR) is the wild variety of a domesticated food crop.) When you look at the status of crop wild relatives, it’s actually very scary. They’re not conserved in the wild. And the degree of conservation in gene banks is appallingly low. Many have gone extinct already—and we have no idea what genes they might have had—for disease resistance, productivity, drought or salt tolerance….
At the same time, there’s exponential growth in the demand for and use of these genes through biotechnology. In the past, when you bred a wild crop relative with a cultivar you might get what you wanted—say disease resistance—but along with that came a tough seed coat or small pod or other things you don’t want. Now, you can use molecular markers to take just what you want.
Q: If they’re not in the genebanks, how do you find wild crop relatives?
A: We’ve been going through 30 major crop genepools, including beans, potatoes, wheat, rice, sorghum, cassava, some forages, coffee…. We collect all available information, through herbarium and genebank databases, of every point where wild crop relatives have been observed. Then we model the species distribution see what all these habitats have in common, to come up with suitability requirements.
So if, for instance, we know something exists in ten sites with these characteristics—where else in the world has those characteristics? That’s where you’re likely to find the species.
Q: For example…?
A: Geneticists were searching for wild chili peppers in Paraguay. We found records of 18 places with chili populations in the past, but they weren’t there any more, nor in collections So we modeled the conditions in the sites the botanists had described—and came up with 20 places with similar environments where people might look. It worked–they found the chilis in seven of those places.
In beans, there are 70-plus wild species, all in the Americas. There are 170-plus wild relatives of potatoes. But in lots of crops—maize being one of the most notable—there are just a few wild relatives left. Most of the species have been lost.
A massive global initiative is urgent for our major crops. That’s what the Global Crop Diversity Trust, housed at FAO, is trying to do.
Q: And the other mantra?
A: Climate change and crops. We’ve taken the 50 biggest crops, by area, and modeled how climate change will change their geography. After the biggest—rice, maize, wheat and a couple of others—no one has done this. We’re using a simple, niche-based approach: this crop grows in an environment with this rainfall and other characteristics, based on expert knowledge.
The shocking thing is that there are huge changes, for both 2020 and 2050. For instance, the models show that maize goes way down in Africa. But cassava gains area. Already, there’s anecdotal evidence of farmers shifting from maize to cassava or sorghum.
In a few areas farmers will lose all sorts of options. Maybe today they have 20 crop options; in the future, maybe they’ll only have 3. Some regions are in serious trouble: Southern Africa. Parts of Sahel. Eastern Brazil, northern Africa and the Mediterranean, including southern Europe.
But in East Africa—the rainy parts, such as most of Uganda—massive increases in rainfall are predicted. So farmers may have more choices. And they may be able to crop continuously. But the models show that pests and diseases also rise.
The bottom line is that everything’s changing, and quickly. The first users of climate-change information should be researchers themselves. Most agricultural research programs take at least 10 years to come to fruition out in the fields. So researchers need to target a 2020 world for their 2020 research results—not work toward better strategies for a 2009 world in 2020.
Q: Why do you call yourself a “promiscuous geographer?”
A: I use the same geographic tools—but apply them to all sorts of things: what we’ve been talking about, plus forest biodiversity, coffee quality, forage, threats to protected areas…. I’m interested in so many things, I seem to need to keep moving around.
You can hear Andy’s perspective on BBC Digital Planet – available at ICT-KM Blog on Famers’ productivity
April 16, 2009
Google Maps has just arrived in Kenya, where it’s feared that mapping the region could inflame inter-tribal tensions over land ownership.
That’s one of the issues that came out of our meeting in Kenya last week: WhereCampAfrica.. But there is a bright side to this!
WhereCampAfrica, which was part of our First Africa Geospatial Agriculture week, brought together about 100 between geographers, cartographers and mobile mapping specialists to discuss the potential – and difficulties – of the ‘geographic web’ in Africa.
The BBC Nairobi reporter David Ogot reports with interviews to our AGCommons steering committee member, Peter Ndunda, CIAT’s Andy Jarvis and ICRISAT’s Pierre Sibiry.
To hear the issues covered in the BBC Digital Planet visit WhereCampAfrica on BBC
April 15, 2009
CJ Terborgh
An interview with Carmelle J. Terborgh, Federal/Global Affairs team lead, ESRI at the Africa Geospatial technology for Agriculture week in Nairobi
Context:
Launched 40 years ago as a consulting and research firm, ESRI created the first commercial geographic information software, ArcInfo. Since then, geographical information system (GIS) solutions have found use in at least 40 industries– from environmental management to epidemiology; agriculture to transportation; disaster response to demining.
ESRI and the CGIAR centres enjoy a close and longstanding relationship. It’s easy to see how the CG benefits: The memorandum of understanding with ESRI provides CGIAR centres with a number of licenses for software, plus technical support, training and professional development opportunities for a fraction of their commercial cost.
In her interview, ESRI’s Carmelle Terborgh describes, among other things, the arrangement from her company’s point of view.
Q: Why focus on GIS?
A: Our founder and president, Jack Dangermond, likes to say: When humans first developed a microscope, we could see things smaller than we could otherwise. GIS is a “macroscope.” Now we can see bigger parts of the world than we could without it. You can only see 13 miles on flat terrain. But the macrosocope gives you a way to understand the world in a way you could never experience from one location. You can sit in Nairobi, say, and see the world.
Q: How do you view the CGIAR?
We want to support people working in agriculture, food security, livestock—their work is critical, and we can’t do it ourselves. We support a number of conservation, humanitarian, educational programs.
As far as the CGIAR goes, we feel honoured that CGIAR centres are using this.
Jack and Laura (Jack’s wife and VP) have a passion for seeing these tools applied for really good purposes. When you see a huge need, you just have to respond.
Q: Any big event coming up for geospatial specialists to get together?
A: We like to convene the people who are using our software and give them a forum. We host the ESRI International User Conference–this year it’s July 13-17 in San Diego. It’s a really good professional development opportunity for CG staff. Usually representatives from about five CG centres come.
A few years ago we focused on poverty mapping. I’d love to do another one focused on food security. That’s an offer we can make to the CG.
Q: What’s a favorite example of using GIS for agriculture?
A: One of our customers, USAID, had a project in Ghana called TIPCEE. It was really innovative in that they had women using GPS to go out and map the size of farmer fields. One thing they found was that plots were generally considerably smaller than people had thought. So farmers had been wasting money paying extra money for fertilizer and plowing. Also, they were buying too much fertilizer, so it was likely running off into the groundwater.
Another result was that since they had good maps of where the cash crops are grown, they had a better idea of where cooperatives and warehouses should be. Better location of those facilities could mean faster processing for export and shipment.
In addition, the maps helped them get organic certification by European markets. For that certification, you need a map to show you’re not, say, in a protected area, or surrounded by farms using chemicals.
Q: How did you get into this?
A: I’m a geography geek. When I was a kid, I used to read a Time Magazine atlas of the world at night, under the covers with a flashlight.
In college I was a forestry major –I wanted to be working out in the field. But then I developed horrible allergies to trees. So I went back to my first love and did my Master’s and PhD in geography.
Also…my father’s blind, and I think his lack of vision made me passionate about seeing the world. I got pretty good at describing the world to him as we walked together, and as we traveled. And geography is the art of describing our world.
April 14, 2009
A Quick Win: Community Knowledge Workers in Uganda
AGCommons, the newly funded project coordinated by the CGIAR, is about getting the right farm information to the right person in the right place at the right time.
To jumpstart the effort, in December 2008 AGCommons challenged organizations to come up with a “Quick Win”: a product that would have real impact on the ground, useable within six to nine months.
The Grameen Technology Center, an initiative of the Grameen Foundation, is one of 5 recently announced winners out of 40 entries. Known for supporting microfinance programs across the world, Grameen Foundation also sponsors other wealth-creation ideas, including “Village Phone”. For this micro-enterprise, a villager takes out a loan, buys a phone, or rather a “business in a box”—and then allows everyone in the village to use the mobile for a small fee
“ Village Phone worked really well in 2001 when we started it, but began losing competitiveness as the cost of mobile phones dropped,” says Whitney Gantt, a Program Officer working with Grameen Technology Center. “But mobiles have much more potential for rural dwellers than just phone calls….”
Enter Grameen’s Quick Win solution. First, Grameen is creating a network of Community Knowledge Workers (CKWs). They will be the information “hubs” who connect agricultural and research institutions with farmers, and vice versa. They’ll have a mobile phone with either a camera or a camera and GPS.
Next comes figuring out the exact types of information farmers need—and how to collect, package, and deliver it through the CKW’s mobile devices. So, for instance, instead of calling an uncle in Kampala to ask about fertilizers, a farmer could ask a CKW, who would connect to the right data source and a have a site-specific answer.
One use of the CKW setup would be an early warning system for crop diseases. Banana diseases, for instance, create a huge drain on farmer income in Uganda, where bananas are a staple crop.
A farmer could call the CKW: “There’s a disease on my bananas.” The CKW motors or bikes to the farm, snaps a photo of the infected plant, and debriefs the farmer with a structured survey, already installed in the mobile. A few clicks send that info plus the exact location (in GPS coordinates) directly to the computers housing the database. As more surveys come in, an analysis of the disease’s whereabouts and progression comes back to the CKWs to distribute to the farmers—along with treatment or preventive actions to take.
And there’s more. “We want to create a suite of information products that CKWs can access and pass along to farmers,” says Whitney. These might include:
Real-time information on markets and prices
Where to buy high-quality seed and chemicals—plus information on improved seeds and how to use them
A farmer hotline. Operators at a call center would answer technical questions using a database, or search on the internet—even connect directly to an expert if necessary. The call-center pilot will begin in early April
A way for institutions and innovators to get news to farmers, e.g. on a new technique for growing organic coffee, or improved, drought-resistant seeds.
“My dream vision,” says Whitney, “is to see this network scaled up—one community knowledge worker per parish. And all functioning as a two-way info channel. Then farmers can overcome info barriers, increase productivity, get higher prices….
“One big challenge is gender. We have about one third women. But it’s not easy to find women to participate. They can get stuck on the farm with their duties. Or prevented by family members from attending meetings or trainings. How to ensure that this includes women and doesn’t exacerbate gender imbalances is a priority.
“I like how dynamic this is. There are a lot of different opportunities to create value with the farmers and CKWs. It’s not just one mobile application focused on markets. You have a system you can plug ideas into and test. If they work, great. If not, you move on to the next thing.”
April 10, 2009
A conversation with Meshak Nyabenge, GIS Unit Manager, WorldAgroforestry Center (ICRAF) Nairobi at the CSI-AGCommons meeting in Nairobi
Q: What sparked your interested in GIS?
A: As a kid, I was always imagining I could develop a boundary map of my village. I don’t know why–maybe ‘cause I was good in geography. I thought why not have a map of our own place, know where it begins and ends.
At the University of Nairobi I studied surveying and photogrametry—how to interpret aerial photos. Fortunately a professor impressed on me the benefits of geographical information. So now I’m a GIS analyst instead of surveying people’s plots and getting into land conflicts over where somebody’s property ends and where somebody else’s begins.”
Q: What are some of the cool things happening with GIS at ICRAF?
A: One is mapping of rainwater harvesting and potential in Africa. We estimated
how much rainwater can be harvested in a particular place based on rainfall and use of a specific technology—roof catchment, rock catchment, runoff, other methods. people can see how much water they’re likely to capture in a local area, with which technologies. It’s being used by the rainwater network in Kenya and at ICRAF.
Also, ICRAF wanted to scale up their agroforestry programs. So we developed suitability maps as way of targeting where to scale up use of, say, fodder trees, like caliandra, glyricidia.
Third is, for GTZ and an energy company, we mapped where 11 key biofuel crops could be grown in Kenya. We looked at jatropha, croton, caster, coconut, cotton, sorghum, sugar cane, sunflower, rapeseed (canola) pagamia…. The oil crops would be for producing biodiesel, and the others, like sugar cane, for bioethanol.
Q: What’s next?
A: We’re now combining the biophysical and agronomic data with socioeconomic data—population, labour availability. Then we’ll know where it’s most suitable to invest in biofuel crops—and what the potential returns would be.
GTZ and the Government of Kenya plan to use this information for planning and as the basis of investment discussions.
We’ve now received funding to map four more countries: Ethiopia, Rwanda, TZ, Uganda for biofuel potential.
We’re also working with a Kenya-based NGO—the Vanilla Jatropha Development Foundation—to do biofuel mapping, specifically for potential for plantations of jatropha, the “oil tree.”
Q: What do you like most about working with GIS?
A: I use it to conceptualize the human dream. And I can manipulate options to come up with scenarios, applied in different fields. Basically, I’ve always worked with geographic information, and can’t imagine not doing so.
Q: So how about that village map?
A: Until now I still haven’t done it…. There have been a lot of other things to do!
April 7, 2009
Patti Kristjanson
Governments, particularly in places like Africa, collect all this data. And they hang onto it. It’s starting to change, but it is still challenging even to find government data and maps in many African countries.
But now, through sites like GoogleEarth, everybody can put up spatial information and make it available to the world. People will actually know what’s going on and where.
This knowledge is power! When people see what’s really going on—the trends in water, in soils, livestock, farming, hunger, disease, and poverty–it will change the way governments function in Africa.
With CSI and collaboration across CGIAR centres, we have a great opportunity to bring together our spatial information on poverty and environment. Together, we can tell a truly powerful story on issues the world cares about–more powerful than we can do as individual centres.
Our comparative advantage lies in the analyses we do to address these tough challenges . And we can really take advantage of opportunities now offered to reach the world by putting our spatial analyses on GoogleEarth, MapMaker, HealthMap and others.
Google Earth is not doing any such spatial analyses, but sure doesn’t mind sharing our results!
More opinions from the participants in the CSI meeting can be found in this blog searching for CSI09
April 2, 2009
Srikant Vasan, BMGF
An interview with Srikant Vasan, Senior Program Officer for Agricultural Development, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and member of the AGCommons steering committee. Now at the AGCommons meeting in Nairobi
Q: What’s the Gates Foundation’s major interest in Geographic Information Systems (GIS)?
A: Agriculture is your prototypical geospatially referenced industry.
Q: Um, translation, please?
A: In other words, for agriculture, location is critically important. It matters where your farm is, what type of soil is there, where the water table is, what your climate patterns are, the distance to your markets. That’s why maps are interesting. The other piece is: Agriculture is very technology and information intensive. We’re big believers in the power of science and technology to improve outcomes. So for both these reasons, we think of geo-spatial information as a key piece of the puzzle.
Q: How are you using GIS?
A: First of all, location intelligence forms a key piece of several grants across our portfolio, from AfSIS (building digital soil maps) to HarvestChoice (enabling key analyses using geospatial information in agricultural development to AWhere (creating local weather data layers to better inform farming decisions). Second, my colleagues in the policy and statistics sub-initiative are looking at primary “Statistics from Space” data and filling gaps, to feed policymakers’ decisions, and enable better crop models using remote sensing data. My focus, though, is based on the assumption that there’s a lot of data already– but it doesn’t get to the field. We want to help data cross boundaries–boundaries within and between institutions. And also to disseminate information out to the field and closer to the farmer. I’m interested in seeing a transition from a focus on data to a focus on solutions. This is happening in bits and pieces. Why should a farmer care what we’re doing How can this data affect a farmer’s life? How can it ultimately improve incomes on the small farm, the dollar-a-day farm?
Q: So how DO you get information to farmers?
A: A good example is Mali Shambani here in Kenya. It’s a radio program that reaches 2.2 milion farmers weekly with information they can use directly.
Q: Not very high tech….
A: It doesn’t need to be cool or fancy technology to be useful! Radio is fine by me. We’re also exploring using cellphones. There’s a model we’re looking into of farmer helplines: people can just call up and ask about their problem and get an answer. It’s showing good early signs of success. Video works, too: local mediators video what successful farmers are doing, then gather a group of 25 to come and watch the video together and talk. In terms of adoption of improved methods per cost – early indicators show that it is up to 10 times as cost effective as regular extension services. We’re planning to support it. Now they are dealing with 1500 farmers. How can you scale that up to 100 times that? And how do you show you have a viable model while doing so?
Q: What are other focus areas of the Foundation for agriculture?
A: The agricultural development initiative has four subdivisions: science and technology, farmer productivity, market access, and policy and statistics. We have 200-plus grants across those four initiatives.
Q: Do you work a lot with the CGIAR centres?
A: The foundation views the CG centers as key partners in our efforts across the board; CG centres are key grantees in all four of these areas.
Q: What is your background, and why are you at the Gates Foundation?
A: I’m an IT entrepreneur, having started, built and sold two companies. After selling the second company in 2007, I wanted to find a way to use my skills and experiences to try to ‘give back’, which is what led to this role at the Gates Foundation. I try to find ways to use IT to turbocharge our efforts to help smallholder farmers.
April 2, 2009
We want to make sure we let you know what is happening in Nairobi. We are twittering from the AGCommons meeting at www.twitter.com/ictkm and we are preparing a number of interviews with the participants. We want to hear from ‘those around the table’, we are giving them a space to talk…. stay tuned….you will read their stories here.
April 2, 2009
On the third day of the joint CSI and AGCommons workshops is AGCommons Day. Today the focus shifts from looking mainly at the CSI community to looking at the broader AGCommons project.
On the agenda will be:
Looks like a long and exciting day ahead.
Check out our social reporting on this blog, on our Flickr site, Twitter and Yammer (for CGIAR staff)
April 1, 2009
In April 2008 we held a very interesting CSI meeting . Here is the group picture we took then
CSI meeting 2008
Yesterday we took a group picture for the CSI meeting in 2009
CSI meeting 2009
No…location is not the difference..both are taken in Nairobi… so…what is the difference?
April 1, 2009
The second day of the CSI and AGCommons workshop is now underway with a theme of ‘Spatial Solutions’. The day will involve presentations from almost all of the CGIAR Centres plus other organisations who have come to participate in this event-all presenting the work they are doing in terms of finding spatial solutions.
During the presentations the participants have been asked to consider what the ‘big issues’ are that are coming out across the clusters of presentations. Participants have been asked to write these on cards which will be grouped and put up on the wall throughout the day as a set of building blocks to guide the deliberations on what should be done as future activities.
Cluster 1:
Cluster 2:
Cluster 3:
Cluster 4:
April 1, 2009
To better facilitate discussion on a number of key topics, issues, opportunities, and action points for the Consortium for Spatial Information (CSI) Annual Meeting, we decided to use a World Cafe approach.
Six topics:
The participants had to choose only 4 of the 6 topics that they would want to discuss due to time constraints. One table was devoted to each of the 6 topics, and a round of discussion was organised to last 30 minutes–20 minutes of open discussions and 10 minutes of capturing and compiling key points. There were two rounds before lunch and two afterwards.
Th conversations at the tables were very active and at the end of each round participants were reluctant to end their very intensive discussions. After a break for another session, each session Chair was asked to present the key points coming out of their table. This was followed by the facilitator opening up the discussion to the whole group for presenting any gaps, additional ideas, and questions. The facilitator then also asked after each group, what the key action points would be.
For the majority of the group, this was the first time to use the World Cafe approach–so it was unsure how it would go and what the reactions would be.
These points will be taken forward throughout the rest of the workshop.
The reactions were very positive to this with the following comments being some of what was said about it:
*” It made the discussions much more structured than before”
*”It was fun!”
*”I like it alot and i thought it brought out alot of good points and generated alot of energy”
ICT-KM Program 