The Transition towards a Sustainable Intensification of Agriculture: The Potential of Remote Sensing to Support Small Holder Farmers in West Africa

Abstract

West Africa is facing two major challenges of the 21st century: climate change and population growth. Both are closely linked to food security in the region. Rising temperatures and increasingly variable precipitation threaten traditional rain-fed agriculture relying on the rainy season. Furthermore, West Africa has one of the highest population growth rates in the world, its population will increase to 1.2 billion people by 2050. To guarantee sufficient food supply and to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), a sustainable intensification of agriculture is needed (i.e., increasing yields without additional land consumption and without adverse effects on climate change) and mitigation and adaption strategies against the negative effects of climate change are required. Sustainable intensification (SI) practices offer the opportunity to stabilize/increase yields and to operate more resource-efficiently. The implementation of SI practices are tasks of the farmers but incentives must be created to accompany the process to enable investments or bridge short term losses. Therefore, a monitoring system is needed. The monitoring of the implemented SI practices is time consuming, costly and over large areas not feasible. Remote sensing has proven to be a suitable instrument to monitor agriculture area and the management strategies in a reliable and cost-effective way. This study in the Senegal River Valley shows the potential of remote sensing to feed a monitoring system on field scale. To address the lack of field data, we trained a convolutional neural network (CNN) to delineate field boundaries from Planet data and monitor agricultural management on field level. The agricultural management like sowing and harvesting dates or irrigation and flooding events are identified using change detection in Sentinel-1 time series. Those data can be used in Manobi Africa’s agCelerant platform rewarding farmers implementation of SI practices and to link farmers with financial institutes like banks and insurance companies.