African Farmers Are Using Private Satellite Data To Improve Crop Yields

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Last year, as the harvest season drew closer, Olabokunde Tope came across an unpleasant surprise.

While certain spots on his 70-hectare cassava farm in Ibadan, Nigeria, were thriving, a sizable parcel was pale and parched-the result of an early and unexpected halt in the rains. The cassava stems, starved of water, had withered to straw.

It was a really terrible experience for us," Tope says, estimating the cost of the loss at more than 50 million naira ($32,000). We were praying for a miracle to happen. But unfortunately, it was too late."

When the next planting season rolled around, Tope's team weighed different ways to avoid another cycle of heavy losses. They decided to work with EOS Data Analytics, a California-based provider of satellite imagery and data for precision farming. The company uses wavelengths of light including the near-infrared, which penetrates plant canopies and can be used to measure a range of variables, including moisture level and chlorophyll content.

EOS's models and algorithms deliver insights on crops' health weekly through an online platform that farmers can use to make informed decisions about issues such as when to plant, how much herbicide to use, and how to schedule fertilizer use, weeding, or irrigation.

AI is expanding across the continent and new policies are taking shape. But poor digital infrastructure and regulatory bottlenecks could slow adoption.

When EOS first launched in 2015, it relied largely on imagery from a combination of satellites, especially the European Union's Sentinel-2. But Sentinel-2 has a maximum resolution of 10 meters, making it of limited use for spotting issues on smaller farms, says Yevhenii Marchenko, the company's sales team lead.

So last year the company launched EOS SAT-1, a satellite designed and operated solely for agriculture. Fees to use the crop-monitoring platform now start at $1.90 per hectare per year for small areas and drop as the farm gets larger. (Farmers who can afford to have adopted drones and other related technologies, but drones are significantly more expensive to maintain and scale, says Marchenko.)

In many developing countries, farming is impaired by lack of data. For centuries, farmers relied on native intelligence rooted in experience and hope, says Daramola John, a professor of agriculture and agricultural technology at Bells University of Technology in southwest Nigeria. Africa is way behind in the race for modernizing farming," he says. And a lot of farmers suffer huge losses because of it."

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