Using ICT for Remote Sensing, Crowdsourcing, and Big Data to Unlock the Potential of Agricultural Data

Estimates that by 2050, the global population could reach 9 billion, with the growth concentrated in poorer countries, particularly the low-income countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. Agricultural productivity will need to double to meet everyone’s needs for food, so producers must increase yields and cropping intensity, improve livestock productivity, and quite possibly diversify their economic activities on and off of the farm, all of which can benefit from revolutionary changes in information and communication technology (ICT), including (1) using multispectral satellite images and energy surface balance models to calculate crop and water productivity; (2) crowdsourcing supplier data via mobile phone; (3) combining gaming and crowdsourcing to identify and monitor cropland; (4) generating open access, spatially explicit data sets, and analyses for more productive farming and better livelihoods in Africa; (5) using the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) Crop Composition Database; and (6) using big data to provide localized weather and agronomic information to producers.