Big variabilities in crop yields make life difficult for farmers, food supply chain companies and governments seeking to plan and allocate resources. This project will provide information on maize yields in Ghana, such as current yields to help plan harvesting, transport and processing, future yields to inform markets and enhance long term food security and past yields to help farmers benchmark and improve productivity. Assimila is working with Farmerline and CABI-Africa to develop an operational system for forecasting maize yields in Ghana using a crop model, coupled with Earth observations and weather data. Information will be provided down to the detail of individual farms – without the need for expensive and time-consuming ground surveys of crop growth, and will be provided to farmers, supply chain actors, governments and international organisations.

We will provide information on: current yields to improve market efficiency; future yields based on climate scenarios to enhance long term food security food security; and past yields analysis to enable bench marking and productivity improvement. We will do this by implementing a quantitative crop yield monitoring and forecasting system based on the integration of physical crop models, meteorological data and Earth observation imagery. The system will produce information at the plot scale for current and future yield analysis, and at the regional scale for long term climate resilience. Information will be provided to farmers, supply chain actors, governments and international organisations.