Posted on March, 21, 2023 at 07:14 am
The future of agriculture involves farmers deciding what, how, and when to plant, based not only on what they see in their fields but also using pictures from space.
Thanks to the work of Catherine Nakalembe, that future is not far off. The Ugandan scientist leads the Africa program for NASA Harvest, the United States space agency’s food security and agriculture program. It monitors crops from space and uses a combination of satellite imagery and data from the ground to help farmers and policymakers on the continent make more informed decisions.
Advances in remote sensing and artificial intelligence allow farmers to estimate crop yields, detect potential damage during the growing season, and even make changes to save their crops from threats like pests or droughts. But access to these insights is limited for the farmers facing the most devastating impacts of climate change. Nakalembe is working to change that by developing tools that make satellite data accessible and useful for farmers and policymakers across East and southern Africa.
Speaking at Devex’s event at South by Southwest, or SXSW, in Austin, Texas last week, Nakalembe presented several geospatial maps displaying metrics like crop type, yield estimates, and pests and diseases.
“While this map is really fascinating and I love looking at it and I love making it, it might not be at all useful for a farmer,” she said.
Nakalembe works with local partners to develop the tools that work best for them — whether maps, dashboards, or apps. She mentioned the radio as another example.
“That would be more powerful than all the maps that I could ever make,” she said. “The farmer does not listen to a map. The farmer listens to the radio.”
Nakalembe is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, which leads the $15 million, five-year NASA Harvest program. She says more investment is needed to ensure partners across Africa can leverage earth observation, ground data, and artificial intelligence to improve food security.
One of NASA Harvest’s projects is Helmets Labeling Crops, a ground data collection effort underway in Kenya, Mali, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda that involves taking pictures of fields from cameras mounted on motorcycle helmets or cars.
“It’s like Google Street View, but for crops,” Nakalembe said at SXSW.
Without ground data to train the machine learning methods that analyze satellite data, assessments may not be accurate for farmers or policymakers making critical decisions in the face of food insecurity or climate change. A related NASA Harvest effort called Street2Sat transforms these images into large datasets of georeferenced labels, with information on location and crop type. This data trains algorithms to recognize specific crops like maize or sugarcane, parse the photos to predict which crops are shown, then turn that data into crop type maps and other tools for individual farmers or national crop monitoring initiatives.
Edrick Bwambale is an agricultural extension officer who works with farmers in southwestern Uganda to increase their agricultural production and has participated in Helmets Labeling Crops. He takes pictures from his boda boda and has helped label some of that data. Nakelembe has become a mentor and has sent him resources to advance his skills around remote sensing and mapping.
“It was a miracle meeting Catherine Nakalembe,” said Bwambale, who has also started a local organization that sets up field schools to show farmers new field management practices.
His first meeting with Nakalembe was casual. She told him to call her Cathy. He found out a couple of days later that she was the Ugandan scientist he had heard about who won the 2020 Africa Food Prize, a $100,000 award from the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.
The rapid advancements in remote sensing and machine learning technology will not automatically translate to impact for farmers, Nakalembe said.
“A lot of people would assume, when you talk about AI and satellites and drones and all these fantastic things, that every farmer in the world at some point, or even right now, could stand in their field and get all those analytics about that particular field,” she said at SXSW. “That’s science fiction.”
The key is for NASA Harvest to codevelop the tools they create alongside farmers, researchers, and policymakers, she said. An example is a rapid-response crop map NASA Harvest developed within ten days to support the Togolese government in getting aid to farmers impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Still, Nakalembe faces a lot of frustration in her work. For example, farmers might not be able to afford changes they know they need to make, such as introducing new seed varieties that can withstand changing weather patterns. And many countries’ agricultural ministries lack the capacity to take advantage of the data she and her colleagues are generating, Nakalembe said.
“Continuing to publish reports about severe drought in Kenya with no program or structure to do anything about it is completely pointless,” she said.
African countries need more resources to invest in basic infrastructure, like internet access and computers, and technical expertise, like data scientists, said Nakalembe, who is also a member of the applied sciences team for SERVIR, a joint initiative of NASA and the U.S. Agency for International Development to improve environmental decision-making in low- and middle-income countries.
And despite growing interest in satellite imagery as a tool for addressing food security, there isn’t sufficient donor funding to ensure regions like East and southern Africa can benefit.
“Her work is so interdisciplinary and cutting-edge and different, and that’s exactly why people like what she’s doing, but also there’s not a lot of structures in place in the existing systems to support people like her,” said Hannah Kerner, machine learning lead at NASA Harvest. “What she’s doing is so overarching, it needs more high-level investment.”
Nakalembe was born and raised in Uganda, where 70% of the working population works in agriculture.
She grew up playing badminton, but when she didn’t get a scholarship to study sports science, she opted for an environmental science degree instead. Her sister, Annet Nakamya, now president of the Uganda Badminton Association, said this allowed her to pursue her other passion of being close to nature.
“Accidents happen, but it was a good accident,” said Nakamya, who often uses her own connections in Uganda to help Nakelembe with NASA Harvest projects.
After undergraduate work at Makerere University exposed her to mapping and fieldwork, Nakalembe earned her master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University, then her Ph.D. in Geographical Sciences from the University of Maryland. Her Ph.D. advisor was Chris Justice, chair of the geographical sciences department. He was the one who suggested she conduct fieldwork in Uganda, which led to her work on a disaster risk financing product that helped over 300,000 people in Karamoja, Uganda, make it through the lean season.
“When people come from developing country environments and do a higher degree, the idea is you take it back and make a difference,” Justice said. “She has made a difference.”
Now, Justice is the chief scientist for NASA Harvest program, and he and Nakalembe have desks right beside each other in College Park, Maryland.
Nakalembe was in Uganda at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and she spent most of 2020 and 2021 there. Her parents helped with her twin boys, now 5 years old, while she worked.
Nakalembe says spending time with people brings meaning to her work, and she’s most animated when talking about the on-the-ground impact of satellite data.
“The relationships that I have with people in different countries comes from me spending time with them, understanding and trying to solve the problem with them,” she said. “It’s not something you can be told. You have to experience it. People have to trust you. You can’t do it over email.”
Travel is still a big part of the job. But now that Nakalembe is back in the U.S., she is growing her research team and mentoring students, in part, so that she can sometimes send others to field visits or events in her place.
There’s been a proliferation of efforts to bring more data-driven decision making to agriculture in low-resource settings. But many of these efforts still fail to get insights “to the last mile,” said Nakalembe.
There is a massive gap between the private companies developing promising technology and the public agencies that lack the support to ensure these tools help people who could benefit the most.
“For me, success equals farmers that are thriving,” Nakalembe said at SXSW. “Are people one, running with the tools that we’ve developed and, two, are farmers much better off than when we found them?”
Source: Devex