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New tool measures crop yield gaps worldwide
Sub-Saharan Africa has the world’s largest gap in farm yields—70 to 90 percent below their potential—according to a new research tool unveiled at the Global Water for Food Conference in Seattle.
The new web-based platform is called the Global Yield Gap and Water Productivity Atlas. According to Frank Rijsberman, CEO of the international agricultural research firm CGIAR, the atlas will help identify regions with the greatest potential to improve water productivity and grow more food sustainably.
“(We’re) getting a much more fine-grained understanding, not just the averages,” says Rijsberman. “We know in the averages there’s a huge yield gap between what we think is possible and what farmers get. Now we can use Big Data to be much more detailed. Where is it that the big gaps are? Can we begin to understand that so we can come up with solutions for them?”
The atlas also provides a platform for analyzing the potential impact of certain crops or new agriculture technologies on specific areas.
“It’s often not simple to know why farmers don’t adopt technologies,” he says. “Why, when you can get four tons per hectare of rice on a station and farmers only have one-and-a-half, why is that?
“It’s bedeviling. It’s a complex set of factors. It can be lack of access to markets. It can be not the right fertilizer because we don’t know much about the soil.”
Officials say the Atlas will help identify opportunities to strategically increase yield and water productivity of existing cropland, rather than tilling more land that may not be ideal for sustainable crop production.
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