Developing a precision irrigation framework to facilitate smallholder dry-season farming in developing countries: A case study in northern Ghana
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Abstract
Changing climate has resulted in increasingly unreliable weather patterns with prolonged dry-seasons in some parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. Food production in these areas is under threat because the people depend mostly on rain-fed farming. Enabling dry-season farming, in light of the prolonged dry-seasons, is central to sustainable food production and poverty alleviation in these areas. Efficient water management is key to successful dry-season farming. Ideally, efficient irrigation water management should involve real-time monitoring of soil moisture (SM) to guide irrigation scheduling. However, farmers in these areas are mostly poor smallholder farmers without the financial capacity to instrument their farms for real-time SM monitoring. We present a precision irrigation framework (PIF) as a low-cost alternative to site-specific SM monitoring to guide irrigation scheduling. PIF applies machine leaning to integrate multi-scale ground-truth data and satellite imagery to create irrigation water management zones for an entire region. We demonstrate the strategy in the Pwalugu area in northern Ghana.
Suggested Citation
Fontaine, J.M., Fentzke, J., Oware, E.K., Doe, E., Guug, S., Lane, J., 2019, Developing a precision irrigation framework to facilitate smallholder dry-season farming in developing countries: A case study in northern Ghana, in SEG Technical Program Expanded Abstracts 2019, p. 4804-4808, https://doi.org/10.1190/segam2019-3216819.1.
Study Area
| Publication type | Conference Paper |
|---|---|
| Publication Subtype | Conference Paper |
| Title | Developing a precision irrigation framework to facilitate smallholder dry-season farming in developing countries: A case study in northern Ghana |
| DOI | 10.1190/segam2019-3216819.1 |
| Publication Date | August 01, 2019 |
| Year Published | 2019 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Society of Exploration Geophysicists |
| Contributing office(s) | WMA - Earth System Processes Division |
| Description | 5 p. |
| Larger Work Type | Book |
| Larger Work Subtype | Conference publication |
| Larger Work Title | SEG Technical Program Expanded Abstracts 2019 |
| First page | 4804 |
| Last page | 4808 |
| Country | Ghana |
| Other Geospatial | Pwalugu Project Area |