High-tech water management research methods are being employed by
African and European researchers to help low-tech South African smallholders improve food security. As South Africa is experiencing its severest drought in more than a century, the researchers are trying to create the first savannah-water-use-and-stress-maps, to help smallholder farmers face the lack of precipitation and to plan irrigation.
Field and Earth observation data, obtained from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Sentinel satellites, will allow the researchers, led by Timothy Dube, at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, and Ana Andreu, at UNU-FLORES in Germany, to determine the health and vulnerability of the ecosystem. They recently collected their first field data in arguably one of Africa's best-known patches of savannah – the Kruger National Park.
In this context, the ESA has just released the African mosaic, which offers a cloud-free view of the continent through 7,000 images captured by the Sentinel-2A satellite. It provides information that can be used to map changes in land cover and improve agricultural practices.
Research determining water use efficiency, using satellite imagery and developing irrigation strategies, is normally associated with high-tech commercial farming in southern Africa. But this data is now also used to help poor small-scale farmers, mainly concentrated in rural areas in South Africa's former apartheid homelands and peri-urban regions.
When water is available, irrigated agriculture plays a major role in food security. "The irrigated area, which is only 10 per cent of South Africa's agricultural production area, provides more than 30 per cent of the food. Hence the vital importance of agricultural water management research," says Felix Reinders, from South Africa's Agricultural Research Council.
For example, near the town of Giyani, about 500 kilometres northeast of Johannesburg, smallholder tomato farmers have experienced the impact of smart agricultural water management coordinated by Stellenbosch University. As a result, their yields increased from below five tonne per hectare (t/ha) to an average of 26.5 t/ha when they implemented a scheduled drip irrigation system, based on soil moisture monitoring.
Read more at: phys.org
