One session at the 2017 Water for Food Global Conference was called “Upscaling Solutions: Expanding access to irrigation for smallholders in sub-Saharan Africa.” This session explored how public and private sector investors can support smallholder-irrigated agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa to achieve greater yield gains and improve livelihoods.
“We did this study, in part, because of what I read in a pre-study about six years ago, that said, for a farmer to buy irrigation equipment, the most expensive part is research and learning about the product. Because it takes so much time for the farmer to get out there and learn about it if it’s not in their backyard and in many cases they don’t have multiple examples of irrigation available to them,” Tim Prewitt, who gave the presentation, reported.
“The planet today is faced with tremendous growth and tremendous stress on its food resource, and we’re only able to feed the people in America right now because technology has allowed yields to increase every year in this country,” he said. “There are huge areas of the globe where farmers are only getting a quarter of the yields we are, and it’s all a matter of getting modern technology to them.”
source: agwired.com
