Blog entries filtered by: Farming, Policy, Risk

The definition of risk used by the HarvestChoice project does not frame risk as inherently bad. After all, farmers and other individuals often voluntarily subject themselves to risks that can be avoided. That is, some individuals may view risk as undesirable, others may not care, while still others may view it as desirable. Individuals who find risk undesirable are commonly referred to as risk averse. Individuals who do not care are commonly referred to as risk neutral. Individuals who find risk desirable are often referred to as risk preferring, loving, or attracted.

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.