A crop monitoring technology project launched last week in Northern Province is expected to help agribusiness by providing timely agronomic data to small scale Irish potato farmers.

Agrilift, a local IT company supported by USAid, is rolling out its geo-spatial technology that relies on drones to measure crop’s growth data and transmit it to a web portal accessible by smallholder farmers’ co-operatives.

The pilot phase will target 2,000 potato farmers in three districts, helping them to make appropriate interventions by providing data on crop health during the growth phase of the crop. Key information expected in real time includes crop optimal maturity, nutrient deficiency, and disease incidence.

“Farmers don’t know how they are doing until the end of the season, with this technology, during the season they can tell in which part of the field things are going wrong and they can begin to make changes,” explained Matt Gants, managing director of Agrilift.

Ignorance on crop performance affects productivity in the Northwest where potato is widely grown and other parts of the country. Despite being a favourite crop in the area, potato yields are relatively low.

According to agriculture officials’ estimates, some farmers’ yield 9 or 10 tonnes per hectare, while in a country like the Netherlands production has reached 80 tonnes per hectare. In recent years, farmers were encouraged to target at least 40 tonnes per hectare.

Agrilift has conducted its first drones test in Musanze with 242 farmers’ plots registered for crop monitoring scheduled for February next year.

Three or four times a season after drone’s flight, farmers whose plots are in the system will receive information on how they are progressing through the seasons.

According to experts, the same geo-spatial technology can be used in other farming areas such as identifying weeds in maize fields.

Agrilift says they are focusing on Irish potatoes because it’s a major crop. However, there are also some obstacles to this technology such unpredictable weather.

“The trickiest thing is weather, when it rains or too windy we can’t fly,” said Mr Gants. The total area of implementation in pilot project is about 25 hectares; while the average size of farm is less than half a hectare.

“We are talking of a very small parcel of the land. On technical side, the smaller the plot gets, the more difficult it is to extract data from that plot in an accurate manner,” he said.

While making data and information available on time is very important in agriculture production, the interpretation is another thing.

In future the company is considering other solutions such as SMS based solutions, but currently it’s the co-operative leaders who will get to farmers in the field and provide, interpret information.

According to Agrilift, in advanced commercially environment such as Europe or in some African countries where there are larger farms the service can be linked to iPads or smartphones.

In future, there farmers will be charged a fee per hectare or farmer fee but this is yet to be determined.