Agriculture

The predominant occupation for rural Nigeria is agriculture. However, the country is often plagued by food shortages due to lack of electricity for post harvest processing, irrigation farming and storage. Also, lack of access to markets is also a hindering factor to economic viability for small holders. This project aims to bridge this divide by providing power for irrigation farming/post harvest storage and processing for four of the major products in the region (rice, maize, cassava and milk).

Shafiq-ul Islam of ACME AI in Bangladesh will produce a smartphone-based system that uses computer vision and machine learning to accurately estimate the weight of cows and goats to help smallholder livestock farmers in rural Bangladesh maximize productivity and profits. Accurately determining livestock weight is challenging for these farmers but critical for determining the right amounts of food and medicines.

Sanjeev Kumar of The Goat Trust in India will develop animated mobile applications that provide information on improving productivity, veterinary and financial services, and markets for women goat herders in the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to increase their income. These women work in remote regions with limited support, and many are illiterate. They will develop simple applications with health, nutrition, animal husbandry, a marketplace, and management components, and integrate value-chain players such as products and services suppliers.

Esther Muiruri of Equity Group Foundation in Kenya will expand their Equity Online-Agriculture platform to provide information on agricultural best practices, including smart-farming innovations, as well as access to financing and markets to initially 200,000, and subsequently up to two million, small-scale farmers in Kenya to improve their productivity and income. They will build the platform to digitally disseminate agricultural information such as soil testing and pest and disease control, which will improve timely planting and crop and livestock management.

Jed Sundwall of Open Imagery Network Inc. in the U.S. will collect and curate high-quality agricultural mapping data from drone imagery in Kenya that has commercial value and can also be openly accessed for public good purposes. High quality and timely geospatial data is often only collected in the commercial sector, which makes it too expensive for the public and philanthropic sectors to access and use to address development challenges.

David Hughes of Pennsylvania State University in the U.S. is leveraging real-time, high-resolution satellite imagery of smallholder farms along with artificial intelligence to automatically detect crop pests and diseases in Africa. In Phase I, together with Nita Bharti also of Penn State University in the U.S.

Hamed Alemohammad of Open Imagery Network Inc. in the U.S. and Ernest Mwebaze of Google AI Research Center in Ghana will generate synthetic imaging data to train machine learning algorithms to better interpret satellite images in low-resource settings to monitor crops and increase food security. The increase in global satellite observations at different spatial and temporal scales has led to the development of sophisticated analytical methods such as machine learning for a variety of applications.

Sunday Ekesi of the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology in Kenya and Josh Tewskbury of Future Earth in the U.S. will model the effects of climate change on major food crops and their insect pests to better forecast crop yields and inform intervention strategies. The changing climate will likely have a multitude of effects on both insect-pest populations, by affecting their size and activity, and on crop physiology, which together will affect yield.

Alison Bentley of the National Institute of Agricultural Botany and Ari Sadanandom of the University of Durham both in the United Kingdom will examine whether a new molecular link that they found explaining the increase in plant diseases (biotic factors) associated with high nutrient levels (abiotic factors) can be exploited to maximize wheat crop yield with minimal negative impact on the environment. Wheat, one of the first domesticated food crops, has been grown for over 10,000 years and is critically important to global food supply.

Travis Bayer of Asilomar Bio in the U.S. is developing a low-cost compound that mimics the plant hormone strigolactone to help eradicate the parasitic weed Striga, which is jeopardizing food security and income in smallholder farms across sub-Saharan Africa. Striga lies dormant in arable soil, and is activated by strigolactone produced by plants including staple crops such as maize and rice. Striga then attaches to the plant's roots, steals water and nutrients, and produces toxins, and can completely devastate crops.