Blog entries filtered by: Productivity, Farming, Production

Just wrapped up three days in Nairobi with our colleagues at the Regional Strategic Analysis and Knowledge Support System (ReSAKSS), pulling together agricultural production and research experts from around East and Central Africa to share our tools and learn how we can make our data products work better for them.

Long-term yield trials are great resources for agricultural researches in multiple disciplines, but such dataset have not been readily available in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Hatfield Experimental Farm in Pretoria, South Africa, is an exceptional case that has been providing maize yield and fertilizer trial dataset with 32 treatments since 1939. In collaboration with University of Pretoria, HarvestChoice facilitated the re-discovery of raw yield dataset from the trial to study the measured long-term yield variability.

As a quick demonstration to estimate crop yield levels at regional-scale with various management assumptions, this post describes how crop systems models can be used to assess yield gap of rainfed maize due to the limited supply of soil nitrogen. This methodology can help researchers to find what is the most critical factor that limits crop yield productivity in a given environment condition and how to address the constraint.

Not only crop growth and yield, crop models can be also used to estimate potential damages from pest/disease through a predefined set of damage pathways, or coupling points.