Can New Technologies Bring Benefits to Smallholder Farmers? Cimmyt's Experience in South Asia, Latin America, and East and Southern Africa.

Abstract Title:Can New Technologies Bring Benefits to Smallholder Farmers? Cimmyt's Experience in South Asia, Latin America, and East and Southern Africa.

Bruno Gerard¹, ML Jat², Ivan Ortiz-Monasterio¹, Peter Craufurd³, Andrea Gardeazaba¹, Urs Schulthess⁴

¹CIMMYT-Mexico, ²CIMMYT-India, ³CIMMYT-Kenya, ⁴CIMMYT-Bangladesh

In recent decades, innovations in the domain of information, communication and geospatial technologies have provided opportunities for the development of site‐specific management applications and various decision support systems for farmers. While most applications at scale for smallholder farmers are still in their infancy, recent work by CIMMYT and its partners in South Asia, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa has shown some of the transformative potential of present and future technical innovations. The work has also highlighted the need to articulate these innovations around viable business models and to develop implementation strategies with public and private partners to reach impact at scale.

 Developing tools for better site specific-nutrient management has been a major focus of our work. Research in Mexico, based on NDVI measurements, from field level with handheld sensor (GreenSeeker^TM) to satellite based application (web-based map server called GreenSat) demonstrated the potential of such tools for nitrogen management, with an average saving of circa 60 kgN/ha per season for pilot wheat and maize growers. New sources of remote sensing data (Sentinel2 and UAV) are under investigation. In South Asia, Nutrient Expert^® tools for Maize and Wheat were developed and validated over the last five years with IPNI, providing location specific fertilizer recommendation for individual fields. The tools, based on the principles of site-specific nutrient management (SSNM), help extension workers to develop quickly fertilizer recommendations in presence or absence of soil test data. Similar work has begun in East and Southern Africa.

 Our research often takes place in data-scarce and very heterogeneous environments, hence the need to develop cost-effective spatially-explicit solutions to better characterize/understand farming systems and their dynamics at various scales. Smartphone-based data collection and crowdsourcing represent largely  untapped opportunities to collect information and data from farmers, extension agents and other development actors, providing in return actionable management recommendations. If widely implemented, geo-located photo-based crowdsourcing in the domains of biotic (diseases, pests, weeds), abiotic stresses (nutrient deficiency, drought), yield gap will generate invaluable spatial information on cropping systems, especially if complemented with satellite imagery. Besides directly helping farmers in decision making, geospatial frameworks should provide key information for monitoring and evaluation of farming systems and assessing impact of development interventions. Current efforts also focus on sound data integration framework that includes the socio-economic dimension of farming systems.