Climate change is taking a toll on farmers in Africa. Here’s how AI technology can help

Maintaining her cocoa farm has become a tedious and demoralizing task for Ghanaian farmer Deborah Osei-Mensah. She’s among many farmers in Africa experiencing the brunt of climate change.

“Each year I report a bit less productivity. This is due to droughts and the change in weather patterns. Days that it’s supposed to rain, we are not getting enough. Days that we have rain, we also get an excess of rain,” she said.

Extreme heat strips Osei-Mensah’s cocoa pods of much-needed water that allow them to properly grow and ripen, leaving them immature and unusable. Meanwhile, excess rainfall tends to leave her trees susceptible to diseases and pests. 

“This keeps on becoming very severe each and every day. If productivity keeps dropping, then people’s livelihoods will be impacted. There will be a high rate of hunger,” Osei-Mensah said.

The unpredictability of ever-changing growing conditions such as historic droughts has been at the forefront of the challenges farmers are facing in adapting to climate change.

Now, a team of researchers in Senegal have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool called Africa Agriculture Watch, or AAgWa, to help address that issue.

By using satellite data and images, AAgWa remotely senses biophysical parameters of the ground, combs through historical production maps, and then uses machine learning to predict possible growing conditions.

It will be able to provide information on heat intensity and its impact on crops, level of expected rainfall, and soil fertility to farmers like Osei-Mensah, said Racine Ly, director of data management at the pan-African research non-profit Akademiya 2063.

“Any disruption that you see in the growing conditions would be propagated into our models and then will show what would be the impact in the production,” Ly told The Current’s guest host Robyn Bresnahan.

“So basically you can have a map where you can know what are the most likely crops that you can grow in a certain area based on the growing condition trends.”

Ly also says AAgWa will be able to inform farmers how much yield to expect.

“If we are able to keep up to date with what is happening at least we will be able to protect most of our crops,” Osei-Mensah said.

AAgWa currently covers 47 African countries with a heavy focus on staple crops such as maize, cassava, and sorghum. According to Ly, it has an accuracy rate of 94 per cent.

“Sometimes we have countries where our predictions are diverging. In that case, what we do is we update the model and update the predictions based on that event,” Ly said.

Punishing conditions

Despite accounting for only three per cent of the world’s global emissions, Africa is among the worst regions feeling the impact of climate change. Agriculture is among the hardest-hit sectors.

According to a 2022 report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), agricultural productivity in the continent has declined by 34 per cent over the last six decades as a direct result of climate change.

That decline poses a risk to Africa’s food security. Already, more than 140 million people are facing acute food insecurity and need urgent assistance.

That number is expected to climb as historic droughts continue to plague East Africa, which is already experiencing its worst food crisis in 40 years.

“There are two ways of increasing food production. You have your crop management. But another way of maybe increasing production is to reduce losses. That’s where AAgWa is focusing on,” Ly said. 

In her decades of farming, the events currently playing out on her farm and others around her come as a shock to Osei-Mensah.

“I got experience about 20 years back when I used to follow my parents to the farm. And so I knew how good weather can improve their productivity,” she said.

But the string of bad weather, diseases to her plants, and poor yields have left her discouraged and even at times questioning whether to continue farming.

“For about two weeks I’ve not been to the farm because when you go there, instead of being happy, you’re sad,” she said. 

Educating farmers on how to use AAgWa is the next hurdle Ly and his team now have to overcome.

“We have farmers that are not willing, maybe, to open their doors to technologies and see how they can use it to improve their production. But also we have farmers that are very interested in using it,” he said.

The researchers have been working with grass root farmer organizations to help translate the data into meaningful information that would lead to tangible actions by farmers.

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AAgWa joins an arsenal of tools, such as hybrid seeds, and drones, being used in the continent to address new challenges climate change has brought to the agricultural sector.

“The work that Racine is doing is fantastic because on the African continent, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, it is very difficult to predict the yield that the farmers will have,” said Canisius Kanangire, executive director of the African Agriculture Technology Foundation.

Kanangire is urging African governments to step up their efforts in addressing climate change and its impact on agriculture by becoming more proactive rather than reactive.

“To be proactive means to get technologies and innovation to the continent and then adapt them to the conditions of the farmers. If we do it, then we would not be firefighting when the drought has hit in an area,” he said.

Among the tools Kanangire is calling for is access to “controlled water” reserves to use during severe droughts and more “drought-resistant technologies translated into the seeds.”

Kanangire also stressed the importance of having projects led and run by Africans.

“When it is done by Africans, we have two positive things that we see. First, it is adapted to the conditions of the African continent. Second, it is at least an assurance that those technologies will be sustained,” Kanangire said.