Rainfall

Risk: we all know what that means, right? But why is it such a critical part of our HarvestChoice portfolio, what does it mean when you look through the lens of farming in Sub-Saharan Africa?

Water availability is the most critical factor for sustaining crop productivity in rainfed agriculture. Even if a drought-tolerant trait is introduced, water isn't available to crops when there is no water in the soil. Rainfall variability from season to season greatly affects soil water availability to crops, and thus pose crop production risks.

Having access to the long-term historical daily weather data has been a roadblock for agricultural researchers who deal with production risk in data-sparse regions.

As an option, by loosely combining two existing global climate databases, HarvestChoice is synthesizing a 100-year daily weather dataset for Sub-Sahara Africa on 50-km grids. This post describes the methodology and provides access to the database, called SLATE (Synthesized Long-term Weather), formatted for input to the crop systems models.