Project Start: 2016
Duration: 4 years
Target Country: Mexico
International Partners: 5
Mexican COMPASS is an IPP-UKSA and Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) funded project started in 2016. Rezatec and the University of Nottingham in the UK, supported by Booker Tate, are working with CIMMYT and COLPOS in Mexico to help smallholder farmers growing sugar cane and wheat to improve crop management. Mexican farmers need to improve crop productivity and stabilise their incomes to facilitate rural community economic development. The technology developed by this 4 year project will use earth observation satellite data (including data from Sentinel) along with in-situ data captured with farmers to help them identify factors that cause the yield gap between crop potential and actual field performance.
The project will provide 7 customer specific decision support tools to help growers, including smallholders, improve their technical, environmental and financial performance. The project will also provide commercial information support, following trials, to advisory services, agribusiness, farmer co-operatives, crop insurers and governments to create a long-term income stream to support Rezatec’s provision of these services.
The overall challenge for both crops is to transform both traditional extensive as well as modern intensive systems into sustainable systems producing more crop output with better use of resources. This requires better management of the interacting parameters controlling yield. There are about 30 site-specific parameters grouped by soil, management, inputs and environment that can determine the production efficiency of wheat and sugar cane crops e.g. soil type, harvest date, disease control and temperature. The theoretical effect of these parameters on production is understood. However, there are no practical, evidence based, management decision tools that support smallholders and larger growers by targeting production efficiency per specific field.
Providing a management decision support tool, informed by satellite and other data sources that is both practical and affordable for smallholders with low levels of formal education, will help them make better crop decisions and thus benefit their incomes and farm development. COMPASS aims to provide this solution.
Rural economic development