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"NOT so long ago Jean Pierre Nzabahimana planted his fields on a hillside in western Rwanda by scattering seed held back from the last harvest. The seedlings grew up in clumps: Mr Nzabahimana, a lean, muscular man, uses his hands to convey a vaguely bushy shape. Harvesting them was not too difficult, since they did not produce much.

This year the field nearest to his house has been cultivated with military precision. In February he harvested a good crop of maize (corn, to Americans) from plants that grew in disciplined lines, separated by precise distances which Mr Nzabahimana can recite. He then planted climbing beans in the same field. On this and on four other fields that add up to about half a hectare (one and a quarter acres) Mr Nzabahimana now grows enough to enable him to afford meat twice a month. He owns a cow and has about 180,000 Rwandan francs ($230) in the bank. Although he remains poor by any measure, he has entered the class of poor dreamers. Perhaps he will build a shop in the village, he says. Hopefully one of his four children will become a driver or a mechanic.

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, Rwanda’s farmers produced 792,000 tonnes of grain in 2014—more than three times as much as in 2000. Production of maize, a vital crop in east Africa, jumped sevenfold. Agricultural statistics can be dicey, African ones especially so. But Rwanda’s plunging poverty rate makes these plausible, and so does the view from Gitega. Another farmer, Dative Mukandayisenga, says most of her neighbours are getting much more from their land. Perhaps only one in five persists with the old, scattershot “broadcast” sowing—and most of the holdouts are old people.

Rwanda is exceptional. But in this respect it is not all that exceptional. Cereal production tripled in Ethiopia between 2000 and 2014, although a severe drought associated with the current El Niño made for a poor harvest last year. The value of crops grown in Cameroon, Ghana and Zambia has risen by at least 50% in the past decade; Kenya has done almost as well."

Read more from The Economist.

AYDORA, ETHIOPIA

"Ethiopia is in the grip of a devastating drought sparked by the worst El Niño in a generation, and aid agencies warn that food aid could run out as soon as May.

Unlike in the past, the government and aid groups have kept food shipments flowing to areas ravaged by drought in recent months. But they need more money, at a time when international donors are distracted by a string of humanitarian disasters around the world.

Ethi­o­pia burned itself into the West’s collective memory with the horrific famines of 1973 and 1984, when hundreds of thousands starved to death and images of dying children appeared on the world’s television screens.

Since that time, the government has struggled to shed this image of the world’s charity case by turning Ethiopia into Africa’s new economic juggernaut, with a decade of 10 percent annual growth. Barring natural disasters, the country is also practically self-sufficient in food.

There has also been a concerted effort in cooperation with international aid agencies to create safety nets to ensure that the kind of famine that inspired the 1985 Live Aid concert would never happen again.

These days, early warning systems alert the government when famine threatens, and in 2015, these kicked into action after the spring and summer rains failed, leaving herders trapped in desert pastures and farmers with extensive crop failures across the north and east of the country."

Read more from The Washington Post.

Contributed by Dr. Steve Philips

Director, IPNI North America Program

Part 2 (of 2 part series)

In his presentation at the 2015 InfoAg Conference, Dan Frieberg, President of Premier Crop Services, said of VRT, “Real world agronomy is integrated and complex; we can’t make what is truly complex simple –we can make it easy, but not simple.”"

Varying rates of fertilizer, seed, water, and other inputs across the field is the easy part. The challenge lies in choosing the information that goes into defining the management zones (MZ). The days of creating MZ solely from a yield map or grid soil sampling are behind us. Decision-making in precision agriculture (PA) has become more data-driven and our ability to incorporate multiple layers of agronomic data into MZ development is greater than ever before. So, which data layers are most valuable in creating reliable MZ?

Yield monitoring remains one of the most popular and commonly used data layers in defining MZ. Yield maps can provide a measure of the scale and location of variability in the field, but if used alone without properly understanding the data, they can be misleading. In his presentation at InfoAg 2015, Dr. Raj Khosla, professor of PA at Colorado State University, discussed the process of yield mapping, how to eliminate errors in yield maps (e.g., “cleaning” the data), and how to evaluate multiple years of yield data to create reliable “decision maps” for MZ delineation. Yield maps are good for answering “where” and “how much” variability exists in the field, but they don’t say anything about “why.”

Soil fertility and other soil properties are often highly correlated with yield as the why” in spatial variability. The best way to collect a soil fertility data layer is by grid sampling the field. The Plant Nutrition Today article “Grid Soil Sampling: How Small? How Often? How Useful?” addresses several questions about grid sampling procedures, but the consensus is that soil sampling density (e.g., grid size) is critical in developing quality soil maps.

Read full version here.

"When Mark Anson came home with his hair on fire after a seminar on the seemingly soporific topic of soil health, his younger brother, Doug, was skeptical.

What had Mark lit up was cover crops: fields of noncash crops like hairy vetch and cereal rye that act on soil like a nourishing facial after the harvest.

Mark, 60, and his two brothers, together with assorted sons and sons-in-law, run Anson Farms, a big commercial soybean and corn operation in Indiana and Illinois. Concern about the soil quality of the family’s fields had nagged at him for some time. “Our corn was wilting when temperatures hit 103 degrees,” he said, and such heat isn’t so unusual in the summer. “I felt like I had a gorilla on my shoulder.” What he learned about the benefits of cover crops gave him hope.

But to Doug, planting some noncommercial crops seemed an antiquated practice, like using a horse-drawn plow. Cover crops had long been replaced by fertilizers. Still, he shared his brother’s concern about their soil. Its texture was different, not as loamy as it had once been, and a lot of it was running off into ditches and other waterways when it rained. So in 2010 the family decided to humor Mark by sowing some 1,200 acres, which Mark describes as highly eroded farmland, with wheat cleanings and cereal rye. Additionally, they spread some cover crops to eroded areas in a few fields.

The next spring, Doug had to admit that the soil texture on that strip was better. And the water that ran off it during a rainstorm was clear, a sign that the roots of the cover crops were anchoring valuable topsoil in place.

But Doug didn’t become a believer until 2013, when the family was grappling with a terrible drought. “In the part of a field where we had planted cover crops, we were getting 20 to 25 bushels of corn more per acre than in places where no cover crops had been planted,” he said. “That showed me it made financial sense to do this.”

Now some 13,000 of the 20,000 acres that the family farms across nine counties are planted with cover crops after harvesting, and farmers around them are beginning to embrace the practice."

Read more from the New York Times.