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Staff Reporter
With unpredictable electricity, rainfall and municipal water supply, South African farmers may need faith like potatoes to manage crop irrigation.
But, scientific suggestions from their smartphones to prevent under or over-watering would also help.
University of Pretoria researchers say that data from satellite imagery and local weather stations have been “calibrated” for the first time in South Africa to inform irrigation strategies on potato farms in the western Free State. The data will be available as an app showing simple indicators of how much irrigation is needed on a particular day.
Once the technology is fully available to potato growers, it will be fairly easy to adapt it to other crops like maize and onions and for other farming regions.
“Farmers will be benefiting directly, and also the researchers and agronomists supporting the growers,” says Alex Mukiibi, a PhD candidate at UP’s Department of Plant and Soil Sciences.
While using remote sensing (satellite images) and weather data for more precise irrigation is not new, says Mukiibi, the technology had not been properly adapted for local soil conditions, local potato varieties and local weather patterns until now.
He explains that remote sensing data must be validated for any unique set of conditions, meaning that it must be checked against true measurements taken on the ground, so that farmers can trust it.
For the scientifically-minded, Mukiibi describes the technical details of this work in the journal Remote Sensing, alongside his supervisor at UP, Prof Martin Steyn, and Prof Angelinus Franke of the University of the Free State.
But for the rest of the country’s potato lovers, this advance means farmers will save on power and water costs, improving sustainability and ensuring that we can enjoy our chips and mash reasonably.
“If we go out for dinner, the team has to eat chips; they cannot choose any other starch,” jokes Steyn.
“I’ve been working in crop irrigation management and on potatoes for my whole life,” says Steyn. Potatoes are a drought-sensitive crop, and they are expensive to grow, so the risk is very high. We see the negative effects of water, pumping, and load shedding costs on farmers.”
Steyn says that in the 1970s and 1980s, only about 50% of potato growers irrigated their crops, whereas now it is closer to 85%.
However, most farmers are still not using the many tools and technologies already available to enable “smart farming” because they are expensive, difficult for non-experts to use, or unavailable in a single app.
Recognising this gap, researchers like Steyn, Mukiibi, and others are working with the industry to deliver remote sensing-based crop water-use data to farmers’ smart devices simply and quickly.
Potatoes SA funded this first “ground truthing” calibration step. Mukiibi and his technical assistants, Nozi Radebe and Stéfan Steenekamp, collected soil and crop data directly on the ground at specific farms in the western Free State.
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