In support of Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)’s Regional Food Balance Sheet (RFBS), the NASA Harvest team at the University of Maryland (UMD) is developing a regional yield sampling framework for evaluating and building a consistent ground dataset for regional yield assessment. This new project, “Developing a Framework for Regional Yield Data Collection,” is supported by the Enabling Crop Analytics at Scale (ECAAS) initiative and builds off the success and lessons learned from NASA Harvest’s ECAAS Phase-1 project.
From July 24-28, 2023, NASA Harvest hosted a collaborative workshop at the University of Maryland. Key participants included representatives from the Kenya Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) and the Kenya Space Agency (KSA). The goals of the week-long workshop were to assess lessons learned from ECAAS Phase-I in Tanzania, understand national and regional data collection approaches, and identify opportunities to integrate the ECAAS initiative with partner institutions for sustained data utilization.
The UMD NASA Harvest program team was led by Dr. Catherine Nakalembe, with support from Ms. Taryn Devereux, Ms. Diana Botchway Frimpong, Mr. Adebowale Adebayo, and Ms. Isha Asalla. Participants included Ms. Jane Kioko and Mr. John Juma Katana from the Kenya MoA; Mr. Kennedy Ogora from the MoA Crop Insurance Programme; and Mr. Peter Okello and Ms. Esther Maina from KSA. Also in attendance was Mr. Kenneth Mwangi (ICPAC).
Guests included Dr. Christopher Justice, Chief Scientist for NASA Harvest, and Mr. John Keniston, UMD Senior Faculty Specialist and GIS Specialist for NASA Harvest. Dr. Garik Gutman from NASA Land Cover and Land Use Change (LCLUC) also gave a guest presentation on the program.
In 2022, UMD implemented a project funded by ECAAS in Katavi, Tanzania, called "Optimizing Crop Yield Data Collection for Supply Chain Enhancement," aimed to test the scalability of collecting rice paddy yield data using the OpenDataKit toolkit.
The July 2023 workshop opened with presentations and discussions assessing lessons from ECAAS Phase-1 in Tanzania, to identify opportunities for institutional integration moving forward. Key topics included finalizing the project timeline and Kenya sampling frame developed by the NASA Harvest team. The group also established data collection methods and fieldwork protocol for the upcoming maize yield data campaign. The resulting data will support development and evaluation of the 2022 maize yield map and estimates.
The UMD team led sessions on using Collect Earth Online for sampling frame labeling and validation. By labeling selected blocks, the field campaign can more efficiently focus on areas with a high prevalence of crop fields. Doctoral student Adebowale Adebayo led the sampling frame design process. He presented the framework methodology and stratification approach early in the week, facilitating discussions on optimal design protocols with MoA and KSA partners. MoA, crop insurance, and KSA partners also gave presentations on their institutions' use of Earth observation data for food security monitoring. This allowed for assessment of available datasets and tools to integrate with ECAAS.
A new round of work under ECAAS aims to build on the following key learnings from Phase-1:
- Early involvement of the Ministry of Agriculture in design and planning to ensure alignment with their monitoring programs and needs. This facilitates institutionalization and sustainability.
- Developing the sampling frame with sufficient lead time to guide data collection.
- Leveraging county extension agents for data collection, as they have local knowledge and connections with farmers.
- Hands-on engagement by the UMD team in field training and data collection to transfer skills.
- Using Kenya as a model case to inform development of sampling frameworks in other focus countries
This ECAAS project will continue through October 2023. Ahead of the national field campaign, the NASA Harvest team will travel to Kenya to hold a collaborative workshop engaging the Ministry of Agriculture and county extension teams. For sustained impact, the project is working closely with the Kenya Ministry of Agriculture to leverage their nationwide extension agent network for local data collection. This collaboration also aims to develop a scalable methodology for evaluating remote sensing-based yield models using field data.