Smallholder advisory reaching 41,000 farmers by SMS
The delivery mechanism was the hard part. The agronomy was well understood; getting it to a 0.4 hectare plot in a form a farmer would act on was not.
The challenge
Nakuru County's extension service covers a very large number of very small farms. Field officers could reach a fraction of them in a season, and prescription maps were meaningless to a farmer without a variable-rate spreader.
What we did
AGRISENSE Programme aggregates field-level stress signals to advisory zones and issues plain-language advisories by SMS in Swahili and Kikuyu, timed to the crop calendar. 38 FIELDKIT nodes anchor the satellite signal. Rift Valley Agricultural College runs independent field validation each season.
Results
- 41,000 farmers enrolled across two growing seasons
- Advisories issued in Swahili and Kikuyu, timed to the crop calendar
- Independent seasonal validation by Rift Valley Agricultural College, published in full
- Field officer visits re-targeted to the zones showing the strongest stress signal
A prescription map is not an intervention. A text message a week before it matters is.
County Director of Agriculture, Nakuru County