CTA Policy brief focuses on weather information services for smallholder farmers

The Technical Centre for Agriculture and Rural Cooperation (CTA) has published a policy brief that emphasize the importance of weather data, and its derived services for agriculture and nutrition and challenges in dealing with weather data value chain.

Farmers need access to accurate and localized weather information to make evidence based farm management decisions which includes when to plant or to apply fertilizer.

The Policy brief outlines the benefits of open data and specifically offer example where open data is useful within the farming practices.

However, for weather data to be of assistance to farm-level decisions, the data should be localized and be field-level weather and agronomic data. An example of the Gezira irrigation scheme in Sudan was given as an example.

Summary of policy recommendations

The following policy recommendations are offered in the Policy brief

1. Capacity building tailor-made for all stakeholders in the value chain
2. Increased technical support for data collection and exchange
3. Developing viable business models
4. Partnerships and collaboration
5. Measuring impact

More information here