HarvestChoice Labs

Cassava is one of the most important staple crops in sub-Saharan Africa, yet it stands out from other crops in many ways. In fact, cassava has been even imposing challenges for us to analyze its production data and modeling growth and productivity. This post briefly explains why.

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.

Mapping the global extent of soil constraints to crop growth plays an important role in developing strategies for agricultural production, environmental protection, and sustainable development at regional and global scales. The most widely used dataset is the Soil Fertility Capability Classification System (FCC) developed by Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) and the Tropical Agriculture Program of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. HarvestChoice facilitated developing an updated version of FCC using the Harmonized World Soil Database v1.1. This new dataset will play a key role in HarvestChoice's forthcoming flagship study on the biophysical/economic impact assessment of agricultural production constraints in Sub-Saharan Africa.

In August, we posted a new collection of more than 3,400 soil profiles that are converted/formatted for crop model applications, based on the WISE 1.1 Soil Profile Database. Utilizing this new soil profiles, as described in the post, we anticipate crop modeling studies to expand their coverage areas even to the locations where no soil measurement data was previously available. For the questions of exactly how, here is a quick example application that can help you find the one(s).