Climate change threatens agricultural productivity and food security worldwide. Meanwhile, farming practices contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. Innovative, data-driven solutions can help build climate-resilient, sustainable food systems, preventing a tradeoff between ensuring global food security and tackling the climate crisis. Advances in data technology — including remote sensing, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning — have significantly improved the precision, quantity and quality of data available for these innovative solutions.

While a promising first step, these technology advances are not sufficient on their own to help change food systems. Producing change at scale requires delivering data needed by different actors in a timely and understandable way. This is particularly true for smallholder farmers, who produce over 30% of the world’s food and are critical to agriculture-led growth and efforts to alleviate poverty and end global hunger. Smallholder farmers are also highly vulnerable to climate change, and often lack resources — including sufficient data and information — to adapt farming practices as conditions shift. Bridging this “climate information gap” by having more precise, tailor-able data available to smallholders on one platform empowers smarter decision-making that boosts sustainable productivity, bolsters food security and alleviates poverty.

IBM’s ability to leverage cutting-edge data technologies, along with its iterative, user-centric Enterprise Design Thinking approach, allows it to deliver these solutions based on the needs of a variety of stakeholders as a pilot or at a full enterprise- or system-level scale. IBM’s approach helps get critical and actionable data into the hands of farmers and communities seeking to build a more productive and sustainable global food system.

Empowering smallholder farmers through tailored crop and weather data

In some parts of the world, unexpected rainfall or other extreme weather conditions can mean financial destruction for smallholder farmers and reduced food supply for an entire community. IBM is working with Yara, the Norwegian-based world leader in fertilizers and provider of environmental solutions, to build the world’s leading digital farming platform to help farmers sustainably improve their yields by combining agronomic knowledge with the power of AI and data analytics. Key to this is the Yara FarmWeather app, which provides hyper-local and reliable weather insights within a three-to-four-kilometer radius specifically designed for smallholders. The app links this geographically tailored data with crop data to provide farmers with crop-related advice, supporting their ability to make smarter decisions that increase their productivity, income and sustainability.

In Latin America, IBM partnered with the Costa Rica Institute of Technology and nonprofit Plan21 to develop a customized mobile application, YvY, that provides smallholder farmers with technical training to make use of insights from weather data, agronomic data and carbon footprint calculations. One important component of the approach is the configuration of IBM resources and technology with local stakeholder input to help participants meet their community and environmental impact goals. YvY uses IBM’s cloud and climate data from the IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite, while leveraging developer and design expertise to ensure solutions meet needs. This allows YvY to combine short-term climate predictions, extended predictions related to crop production, agronomical data and other valuable data to produce tailored information for small producers. This includes better day-to-day decisions on how to manage their crops, seasonal forecasts to inform planting decisions, advice on soil regeneration and carbon and water footprint estimates.

Improving water usage through remote sensing and AI

Reliable access to an adequate quantity and quality of water for health, livelihoods and production needs — also known as water security — is increasingly vulnerable to climate effects. Recent studies estimate that nearly two-thirds of the world’s population face water insecurity for at least one month of the year. Smallholder farmers require water for growing purposes and can pollute it through runoff of fertilizer and other agricultural inputs, yet they often lack the tailored data they need to make more efficient decisions on watering or applying fertilizer.

Together with IBM, Netherlands-based nonprofit Deltares is working to enhance and expand the reach the Aquality water quality monitoring app. The tool leverages data crowdsourcing and machine learning to help communities detect nitrate pollution and other water quality characteristics and is experimenting with AI to provide tailored feedback and recommendations to farmers. This helps farmers improve community water quality, protect biodiversity, save on fertilizer costs and make farming practices more sustainable. Currently in use in the Netherlands, the Aquality app is being piloted in the United States, Denmark and South Africa.

IBM and Texas A&M AgriLife are working together to help farmers receive insights for water usage. Texas A&M AgriLife and IBM will deploy and scale Liquid Prep, a tech solution that provides “when to water” decision support to farmers. The tool works by placing low-cost sensors developed by IBMers into the soil to record moisture and temperature levels, which are then uploaded to the IBM Cloud and combined with weather forecast data from the IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite, and crop-specific information from Texas A&M Agrilife and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). The app will analyze the combined data using AI to provide farmers with recommendations on when and how much to water via a smartphone app.

While technology alone cannot transform complex systems, examples like FarmWeather, YvY, Aquality and Liquid Prep showcase the potential for data-driven tools to boost productivity, agriculture-led development and environmental stewardship and contribute to a more resilient and sustainable global food system. By partnering harnessing advances in data technology and using iterative, user-centric design, IBM has deployed innovative solutions that empower smallholder farmers with tailored, timely data insights to contribute to this change. Looking ahead, realizing this potential at scale will require us to ask and answer questions — how can we get better actionable intelligence into the hands of smallholder farmers? What data gaps do smallholders face? What role can governments, communities and nontraditional actors play in finding innovative solutions? Leave your thoughts in the comments.