Climate data vital for productive and resilient agriculture

Nov 15, 2018

Variability in weather often influences farmers’ decisions such as choice of agricultural enterprise to engage in, crops to grow, when to plant. It may also deter farmers from adopting new technologies and market opportunities.

OPINION

By Dr. Damalie Akwango-Aliau - Climate change and Adaptation Specialist

Agriculture in Uganda is mainly rain-fed, therefore, weather and climate are the main drivers of production. Climate change and variability exacerbate the country's socio-economic woes, especially in the light of pressures in trying to achieve food security and alleviate poverty.

Variability in weather often influences farmers' decisions such as choice of agricultural enterprise to engage in, crops to grow, when to plant. It may also deter farmers from adopting new technologies and market opportunities. 

While taking such risks could improve yields and boost profits in a good season, extreme weather events such as drought, floods or outbreak of pests and diseases can wipe out crops or livestock, leaving farmers impoverished.

Farmers in Uganda are among the world's most vulnerable and least adapted to climate change. The main challenges that they face are limited access to agriculture meteorological and disaster related information, financial resources and social safety.

Addressing these challenges requires approaches that can empower the farming community to adapt, mitigate, and reduce climate change effects whilst achieving sustainable increase in agricultural productivity and incomes.

Empowerment of communities requires, as a first step that government of Uganda provides farmers and other agricultural sector stakeholders' access to real time climate information. Farmers and agriculture professionals require climate information to make critical farm and business decisions. 

The government through the Ministry of Water and Environment, specifically through Uganda National Meteorological Authority has made efforts to provide climate information, however it is not adequate due to the limited agro-meteorological forecasting infrastructure in the country.

Therefore, as we plan to improve our infrastructure forecasting capacity, the Government could plan to subscribe to access agriculture observatory climate data from aWwhere system for a period of one year.

Within this one year, Uganda would access agriculture observatory data from aWhere and model climate information to the suitability and utilisation by farmers and other stakeholder's needs.

Where a system collects more than seven billion data points across the planet each day to create visibility and insight for the agricultural earth, provides weather forecasts, monitor weather performance and predict crop yields ahead of time. aWhere delivers agricultural intelligence into the hands of farmers, commercial growers, commodity traders and policy makers everywhere in the globe. 

The aWhere is a special crop and climate system developed in the US since 1999 with the capacity to make daily analysis of global weather data, produces global weather forecasts at a spatial resolution of 9km spacing, using the Global Forecast System content produced by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The accuracy levels is at the order of 80 to 85% accurate for a three to five day forecast, with downscaled forecasts which consider local conditions and knowledge.

It provides for Application Programming Interface (API) allowing programmatic access to ag-weather information covering the whole of the Agricultural Earth

At a resolution of 9km, it can create numerous virtual weather stations across the country measuring all weather parameters.

The ability of the system to produce weather forecasts at a resolution of 9km can improve the capacity to generate specific forecasts for the end user. 

In addition, the ability of the system to act as virtual weather stations can enable agro-meteorologists acquire historical weather data across the country at such resolution to make detailed Agromet bulletins and early warning information.

The system can enable each district, county and sub-county in Uganda to generate monitoring reports on weather performance, which is a key input in agricultural production and disaster preparedness.

The information has to be generated and translated in a simple, user-friendly mode for access and utilisation by all the different stakeholders. 

Specifically the climate data can improve agricultural production in Uganda by modeling it to provide;

• Crop-specific information for agriculture research and development as well as help assess the commercialization of crop varieties and agriculture inputs.

• Field-specific information for commercial agriculture businesses and input providers, to determine the right inputs at a given time.

• Field-level observed and forecast weather, crop growth stages, plus pest and disease risk, guiding irrigation recommendations, developing pest and disease models and assessing viable agricultural product markets 

• Right smallholder service information to the right farmers at the right time. Farmers who use the service are more likely to grow a new crop, plan better when to plant, spray, weed and change their agronomic practices, resulting in significant yield increases.

This in a way builds smallholder farmers' resilience, productivity, and incomes that support community and national food security in the country. 

The writer is a senior research officer in NARO

 

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