In May, FutureWater joined TU Delft, Tahmo and Holland Greentech for a trip to Ghana for the SOSIA+ project.
During this week, the team further developed the dashboard and irrigation service, refining the dashboard’s usability, expanded crop choices, and optimized the layout. The team presented demonstrations to the irrigation engineers of Holland Greentech in both Accra and Kumasi, incorporating valuable feedback to enhance the user-friendliness of the dashboard.
At visits to the KNUST (Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology) Business Incubator and Kwadaso Agricultural College the dashboard’s capabilities were showcased, amongst others to business students interested in merging technology and agriculture. Additionally, the team explored various agricultural sites around Kumasi to gather information to enhance the operational side of the SOSIA+ service.
Finally, preparations have been made for conducting the trials for incorporating the SOSIA+ advice in the growing season, which starts in September. During the visit, valuable insights were gained, highlighting the need for optimized irrigation practices.
Demo plot at KACField visit in KumasiInspecting a TAHMO station at KACPresentation for Business Students at KBI
Over the last months, FutureWater developed and launched its What-to-Plant application for the Mavo Diami project in Angola. The What-to-Plant service from FutureWater provides planting advice to farmers for the upcoming crop season, so that farmers can anticipate on which seeds to buy. The consortium will continue with keeping services operational so it can be used in Angola and exploit relevant opportunities to increase the added value for the smallholders.
This Geodata for Agriculture and Water (G4AW) project started in 2019 to improve sustainable food and income security for smallholder farmers in Angola, by accelerating their agri-business performance through informed decisions supported by the Mavo Diami services built on weather, soil and crop signals and other relevant data and indicators. The project was carried out in a consortium with World Vision, eLEAF, Weather Impact, Aequator, GaiaVision and KRES.
The partners developed various microservices, such as a meteorological forecast application, a rain season indicator and weather suitability predictor by Weather Impact, the What-to-Plant application by FutureWater and the When-to-Plant application by eLEAF. All microservices where validated by three different validation tests. Local implementation was assured by training several hundreds of extensionists, responsible for onboarding new farmers and providing them with valuable information from the Mavo Diami service. The What-to-Plant service from FutureWater provides planting advice to farmers for the upcoming crop season, so that farmers can anticipate on which seeds to buy. With this service, farmers get an insight on which crops are suitable for planting or not. To provide this advice, land suitability maps for several crops are calculated, based on remote sensing, historic data and a range of parameters such as historic temperature and rainfall, soil hydraulic properties, cropping calendars and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). These land suitability maps provide a number from 0 to 1 for every pixel for the crop modelled, with 0 being unfit to plant and 1 being very good to plant. With the seasonal weather forecast input provided by Weather Impact, the modelled land suitability maps can be turned into a monthly what-to-plant advice, thus giving information if a crop is suitable or not for the coming three months based on current weather information.
During the project, continuous improvements and various updates have taken place based on feedback from local partners and users. With the launch of the newest version of the Voicebot and Chatbot, that enables farmers to obtain the What-to-Plant information through their mobile phone, the project has formally come to an end. The consortium will continue with keeping services operational so it can be used in Angola and exploit relevant opportunities to increase the added value for the smallholders.
On May 22-23, FutureWater attended the Preliminary Design Review Meeting (PDR) for the MAGDA project in Bucharest, Romania.
The meeting was hosted by the National Meteorological Administration, and it was a great opportunity for project partners to meet in person and present the latest achievements. The major outputs from the first six project months were the following:
Selection of the three major MAGDA demo sites in France, Italy and Romania.
Analysis of MAGDA user requirements (surveys for the agricultural and water sectors are still open for participation!)
Detailed MAGDA system design: Summary of the technical data requirements of GNSS stations, IoT sensors, Meteodrones, remote sensing, weather forecast and hydrology modelling with SPHY.
The next months will now be used to install the equipment at the demo sites and start with the first modelling and site measurements, as well as the evaluation of historical data for calibration.
FutureWater is leading the irrigation advisory service of MAGDA, making use of hydrological modelling using SPHY (Spatial Processes in Hydrology). The output expected consists of an operational irrigation service to provide advice on when and how much to irrigate at certain moments during the cropping season, using as input data improved weather forecasts.
More information about the project can be found here and visiting the MAGDA Project website.
FutureWater presentation on MAGDA System ArchitecturePreliminary Design Review MeetingMAGDA Partners at MeteoRomania
Looking at global climate change patterns and its increased pressure on natural resources, West African countries like Ghana will be hit very hard. In particular, agriculture, which is the largest water user in Ghana, will be affected by high temperatures and changes in the variability of rainfall. This variability in climate makes crop production and yield more uncertain, as well as farm income. The periods of droughts in Ghana are getting longer and there is increased pressure on water availability from the river basins due to climate change, putting many people and farmers in risk of having too little water. Therefore in this project, we will develop and pilot in the field an innovative tool that will significantly enhance water security in Ghana by reducing the quantity of water needed for irrigation per hectare (up to about 40% less of current water use).
To support the Ghanaian farmers in making the transition to a water secure future, they expressed a need for locally adapted, climate smart irrigation technologies and innovative advice to improve their irrigation practices. To develop such a smart irrigation service, FutureWater is working together with knowledge institute TU Delft, horticulture company Holland Greentech, and social enterprise TAHMO to develop this innovative tool and implement it in the field. This smart irrigation service should be able to translate various weather parameters and data (historical but also real-time data) into crop specific irrigation advice in volumes, but also in minutes for small-scale farmers. The unique and innovative part of this smart irrigation service, called SOSIA+ (Small-scale Open source, Satellite based Irrigation Advice), will be the algorithm to provide advice on how many minutes a farmer should irrigate a specific crop – based on the combination of the TAHMO local weather data and real-time data (normally not taken into account), that will be tailor-made for small scale farmers (normally these services are only for large scale farmers while the predominant type of farmers in Ghana are small scale) and is linked to the innovative drip irrigation systems that Holland Greentech Ghana already sells to farmers (so closely linked to an existing customer base of farmers and a product).
SOSIA+ will initially focus on the city of Kumasi and the Ashanti region, targeting more than 500 farmers and a growing population of more than 4 million people that needs to be fed and are affected by the changing weather patterns and increased water demand. In the long-term, the goal is to transform the horticulture sector in Ghana towards a smart and sustainable practice. By developing the Irrigation Advisory Tool, we can prevent over-irrigation to reduce water use and hence work towards the desired situation of sustainable food production and water security. This project will focus on gathering better weather information, piloting an innovative irrigation tool that is linked to a drip irrigation system to reduce water losses and implement this in the field with lead farmers. This will change the current traditional practices of the farmers leading to less water and energy losses, hence increasing availability of water and the sustainability of food production in light of climate change.
Earlier this year FutureWater and Holland Greentech developed a very first draft of the irrigation advisory application ‘SOSIA’ for Rwanda, with promising results. As one of the main problems in many African countries is that there is no ground network of weather stations, making it very difficult to efficiently manage water resources or generate weather forecasts that are localised and essential for food production, the initial SOSIA project used satellite remote sensing data to overcome this problem. But given the rapidly changing weather patterns due to climate change, the collection of ground data is also essential. This is why TAHMO has been set-up to develop a dense network of weather stations all over Africa and using their data will be very valuable to use for the irrigation tool.
The video below gives a brief summary of the tool created in the previous SOSIA project.
“How long do you irrigate per day?” we asked Madame Christine, a small-holder farmer with an eye for business. “Well, I used to irrigate for up to three hours every day, but not anymore. I can now double my fields under cultivation and sell more crops while using the same amount of water!”
We received this reaction during our field trials in Zambia for our newly developed Satellite Open-Source Irrigation Advisory (SOSIA) tool. This tool was developed within the two-stage call for innovations based on open-source geodata launched by the Netherlands Space Office (NSO), which aimed at positively impacting food security and sustainable land and water management in Africa. In response to this challenge, FutureWater and Holland Greentech developed the SOSIA tool to help small and medium farmers make informed decisions about their irrigation practices. Because – while irrigation is a crucial aspect of agriculture, over-irrigation can lead to significant environmental problems, and it reduces profits for farmers. Using less water can lead the farmer to spend less time irrigating, having a lower electricity/fuel and water bill, improving the water productivity of crops and contributing to a sustainable environment.
What is the SOSIA tool?
SOSIA is a state-of-the-art, open source, satellite-based tool that provides both historical and near real-time information on irrigation water requirements for smallholder farmers, calculated based on open-source geodata and specific additional farmer and crop information. The tool was developed to overcome the often-limited ground data availability for calculating crop water requirements. The only data farmers can rely on are traditional weather stations, often far away from their fields. With the SOSIA tool, the farmer receives information based on open geodata for their location, by converting the spatial data into Virtual Weather Stations (VWS)!
Seasonal and hindcasted irrigation information
The SOSIA tool provides a farmer with irrigation advice, expressed in minutes of irrigation duration, throughout the crop season. Before the farmer plants the crop, an extension officer of Holland Greentech uses the SOSIA tool to provide the farmer with their tailor-made seasonal crop schedule, which is an overview of expected irrigation minutes for the rest of the season, calculated based on the average evapotranspiration of WaPOR of the 10 years.
Figure 1. Graphical User Interface of the SOSIA tool, hosted on the Google Earth Engine platform.
As climate is changing, the average of the last 10 years does not always give an accurate depiction of what is happening in the field. Therefore, the SOSIA tool calculates the irrigation requirements for the last week based on open source geodata. The irrigation engineer uses this functionality on a weekly basis to make use of the actual climate data and informs the farmer only if additional irrigation is required, compared to the seasonal reference schedule.
Testing the SOSIA tool with farmers
To test the tool in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa, trials were set out in both Zambia and Rwanda with farmers from the Holland Greentech client base. The farmers were quite positive about the observed impact of using the tool. Many were surprised that the advice indicated less irrigation time than they were used to. While following the advice, the farmers also kept records of the realized number of minutes of irrigation, estimation of soil moisture and signs of drought stress. No farmer recorded any drought stress on the crops. The observations of the farmers showed that the crop performance of the SOSIA irrigated trial was visually the same as fields irrigated under their normal irrigation regime (Figure 3). The farmers were enthusiastic about this water saving, mainly because of the related decrease in electricity / fuel costs. For most of the farmers involved in the field trials, SOSIA reduced irrigation water requirements while optimizing yield.
Back to Madame Christine: she indicated that she usually irrigates her lettuce fields 1 hour in the morning and 1 hour at the end of the afternoon. She was surprised that the SOSIA advise only advised her to irrigate in the range of 50-57 minutes daily. When applying the advice, she did not notice any drought stress in her lettuce crop, and the harvest was visually the same for both the demo and control field.
Figure 2. Conducting an interview with farmers in Zambia.
Benefits for extension advisors
Extension officers are the primary intended users of the SOSIA tool on a daily basis. During the piloting phase, the extension officers from Holland Greentech received the tool with great enthusiasm. They praised the user-friendliness, quality and spatial detail of the information, and efficiency compared to traditional methods to provide advisory services.
Conclusion
In conclusion, SOSIA is a valuable tool for anyone involved in irrigation management for small and medium farmers, particularly in an African context. By providing near real-time information on irrigation water requirements, it helps farmers to irrigate more efficiently and thus to realize a more sustainable use of water resources. By leveraging the power of open source geodata, costs are kept relatively low while access to a wealth of localized information is achieved. Initial results from the Zambia and Rwanda trials indicate that application of the SOSIA tool saves farmers water, electricity/fuel, time and improves the water productivity and, potentially, income!
Figure 3. Difference between the SOSIA Demo and Control plot at Sunripe Farm, Rwanda (08/11/2023).
Early November Agência de Desenvolvimento do Vale do Zambeze (ADVZ) from Mozambique visited the FutureWater office in Wageningen, the Netherlands where a full day was planned with APSAN-Vale project partners Resilience, FutureWater and HiView. From FutureWater side Tijmen Schults and Lisa Verschuren provided an interesting presentation on the water productivity results of the passed season. Furthermore, a demonstration of the new Rapid Eye XS drone was provided in the floodplains of Wageningen. The day was concluded with a fruitful discussion on strengthening the future cooperation.
Agência de Desenvolvimento do Vale do Zambeze beneficiary of the APSAN-Vale project in central Mozambique. The project has as its overall aim to increase climate resilient agricultural productivity and food security, with a specific objective to increase the water productivity and profitability of smallholder farmers in Mozambique, prioritizing small (family sector) farmers to increase food and nutritional security.
This project will demonstrate what the best combinations are of adoption strategies and technological packages, with the largest overall impact in terms of water productivity, both at the plot, sub-basin as well as basin-level. The main role of FutureWater is monitoring water productivity in target areas (both spatial and seasonal/annual variation) using flying sensors (drones) in combination with a water productivity simulation model and field observations.
Visit of the Agência members to the Wageningen office
Field demonstation of the Rapid Drone XS in Wageningen
Currently, farmers rely on weather forecasts and advisories that are either general for a given, often wide, region of interest, or highly customized to the farmers’ needs (e.g. by combining large scale atmospheric variables into synthetic parameters of interest). In both cases, such forecasts and advisories often don’t rely at all on observations collected at or around the target cultivated areas, or they are limited to traditional observations provided only by weather stations, without exploiting the full extent of measurements and observations available through European space-based assets (e.g. Galileo GNSS, Copernicus Sentinels) and ground-based radar data.
MAGDA objectives go beyond the state-of-the-art by aiming at developing a modular system that can be deployed by owners of large farms directly at their premises, continuously feeding observations to dedicated and tailored weather forecast and hydrological models, with results displayed by a dashboard and/or within a Farm Management System.
FutureWater is leading the irrigation advisory service of MAGDA, making use of hydrological modelling using SPHY (Spatial Processes in Hydrology). The output expected consists of an operational irrigation service to provide advice on when and how much to irrigate at certain moments during the cropping season, using as input data improved weather forecasts.
During this task, the SPHY water balance model will be setup for three selected demonstrator farms in Romania, France and Italy. Finally, the irrigation advisory will be validated using performance indicators (e.g., water productivity, crop yield analysis, water use efficiency) using ground truth data (e.g., weather stations, moisture probes, crop biomass measurements)
The Lunyangwa Dam is the source of water supply for Mzuzu City, Ekwendi Town and surrounding areas. Currently, the yield of the dam is lower than the annual average daily water demand from the dam. A quick intervention for this problem is to raise the spillway of the Lunyangwe Dam.
In order to determine the height of the redesigned spillway, FutureWater conducted a hydrological study for the Lunyangwa Dam Catchment to determine flood extremes for several return periods. HEC-HMS was used for calculating the peak volumes and discharges. The input for the HEC-HMS model was retrieved using satellite-based datasets for rainfall and terrain. Furthermore, the flood routing was simulated with an elevation-storage curve. The output of this study will be used for the redesign of the spillway.
Agriculture is a key sector of the Rwandan economy; it contributes approximately 33% to the gross domestic product and employs more than 70% of the entire labour force. Although some farmers are already using water-efficient irrigation infrastructure, too much of the available water is still lost due to unsustainable use of existing irrigation systems, and/or maximum crop yields are not achieved due to under-irrigation.
Hence, small to medium-sized food producers in Rwanda do not have sufficient access to information regarding optimal irrigation practices. To close this information gap, FutureWater has devised an innovation that can calculate a location-specific irrigation advice based on Virtual Weather Stations, expressed in an irrigation duration (“SOSIA”). The use of the outdated CROPWAT 8.0 method, and the lack of good coverage of real-time weather stations in Rwanda, means that current advice falls short. In addition, existing advisory services are often too expensive for the scale on which small to medium-sized farmers produce. There is a potential to increase the productivity of the irrigation water by up to 25%. Initially, the innovation will be disseminated via the Holland Greentech network, with a pilot in Rwanda consisting of 40 customers. Aside from further refining the SOSIA tool, upscaling strategies will be explored in this second phase to identify other intermediaries that could benefit from the SOSIA service so to realize its optimal impact.
FutureWater has found with Holland Greentech an ideal partner to roll-out this innovation due to their presence in and outside of Rwanda, where they provide irrigation kits and advice. This offers the opportunity to quickly scale-up the proposed innovation. With their expertise in agro-hydrological modeling and the African agricultural sector, FutureWater and Holland Greentech respectively have acquired ample experience to make this innovation project and its knowledge development to a success.
For smallholder farming systems, there is a huge potential to increase water productivity by improved (irrigated) water management, better access to inputs and agronomical knowledge and improved access to markets. An assessment of the opportunities to boost the water productivity of the various agricultural production systems in Mozambique is a fundamental precondition for informed planning and decision-making processes concerning these issues. Methodologies need to be employed that will result in an overall water productivity increase, by implementing tailored service delivery approaches, modulated into technological packages that can be easily adopted by Mozambican smallholder farmers. This will not only improve the agricultural (water) productivity and food security for the country on a macro level but will also empower and increase the livelihood of Mozambican smallholder farmers on a micro level through climate resilient production methods.
This pilot project aims at identifying, validating and implementing a full set of complementary Technological Packages (TP) in the Zambezi Valley, that can contribute to improve the overall performance of the smallholders’ farming business by increasing their productivity, that will be monitored at different scales (from field to basin). The TPs will cover a combination of improvement on water, irrigation, and agronomical management practices strengthened by improved input and market access. The goal is to design TPs that are tailored to the local context and bring the current family sector a step further in closing the currently existing yield gap. A road map will be developed to scale up the implementation of those TPs that are sustainable on the long run, and extract concrete guidance for monitoring effectiveness of interventions, supporting Dutch aid policy and national agricultural policy. The partnership consisting of Resilience BV, HUB, and FutureWater gives a broad spectrum of expertise and knowledge, giving the basis for an integrated approach in achieving improvements of water productivity.
The main role of FutureWater is monitoring water productivity in target areas using an innovative approach of Flying Sensors, a water productivity simulation model, and field observations. The flying sensors provide regular observations of the target areas, thereby giving insight in the crop conditions and stresses occurring. This information is used both for monitoring the water productivity of the selected fields and determining areas of high or low water productivity. Information on the spatial variation of water productivity can assist with the selection of technical packages to introduce and implement in the field. Flying sensors provide high resolution imagery, which is suitable for distinguishing the different fields and management practices existent in smallholder farming.
In May 2020, FutureWater launched an online portal where all flying sensor imagery from Mozambique, taken as part of the APSAN-Vale project, can be found: futurewater.eu/apsanvaleportal
Project video: Portrait of the activities on water productivity
