The AGCommons team spent 3 days in Ghana in late March 2009, talking to various organizations about AGCommons and the potential for providing location-speicifc information to farmers and those that support them. Here is a summary of what we heard:
There are a significant number of projects and organizations who are using GIS to provide information to farmers and to help farmers. Local GIS and IT capabilities exist with several organizations, including CERSGIS, esoko, and other organizations. There is useful market and yield information available that could be spatially enabled and provided to the extension agents and farmer’s organizations to enable them to better help the farmer.
Extension agents used to be funded by the government, but are not sufficiently funded to be providing information to farmers. Many projects and organizations have developed their own extension network.
It is a challenge to get farmers together and to get them to change their traditional methods. One approach is to get identify a lead farmer to provide information and training. Once the other farmers realize that the lead farmer is increasing his productivity and income because of the information provided, the others will follow.
In Ghana, more and more farmers have cell phone or have access, so providing information to farmers via SMS should be feasible. It is being done by esoko and others. The opportunity for AGCommons is to compliment these efforts by making the information location-specific and combine other information in addition to market price, including but not limited market capacity and transport accessibility and cost.
Even though the government is subsidizing the cost of fertilizer by 40-50%, many farmers use too low an application rate to achieve the benefits, so then the farmers don’t use the fertilizer again. Providing the farmers with crop- and location-specific information on fertilizer application rates could increase use of effective fertilizer use and yields. GPS and geospatial information could be used to reduce farmers’ bottom line by providing farmers with their actual acreage. On average, farmers have 40% less land than they thought and are paying for the cost of services based on their stated acreage.
Leave a Reply