The University of Nebraska-Lincoln is the lead technical partner is a new $5.65 million project to enable much improved profitability of fertilizer use for 13 sub-Saharan countries.
The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) recently awarded the grant for OFRA (Optimizing Fertilizer Recommendations in Africa). UNL will work with CABI-Africa and national agricultural research institutes in 13 countries: Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.
Professor Charles Wortmann of the Department of Agronomy and Horticulture is the UNL PI on this project. The fertilizer use optimization is aimed at food crops and depending on priorities of partner countries may include maize, sorghum, pearl and finger millet, teff, cassava, rice, beans, groundnuts, soybean, pigeonpea, chickpea and cowpea.
In sub-Saharan Africa, fertilizer use is very low with only 8-9 pounds per acre applied to such food crops. Crop production is primarily by poor, small-scale farmers with very little financial capacity. Fertilizer use needs to compete with basic needs in allocation of the small amount of money available. Therefore, net returns on investments need to be very high.
This project grew out of UNL collaboration in Uganda where a national team of soil scientists did the field research to develop a total of 15 nutrient response functions encompassing 6 crops. It soon became obvious that some crop-nutrient responses were much more profitable than others and that lower rates of application are more profitable than high rates of application. Therefore, net returns on the small investments that these small scale farmers can make are optimized by choosing the most profitable crop-nutrient-rate combinations.
Professor Wortmann and then UNL graduate student Jim Jansen developed a decision tool that does the calculations of optimizing across the 15 crop-nutrient response functions developed for Uganda. It then determines the allocation of fertilizer to crop-nutrient-rate combinations, given the farmer’s financial constraint, that is expected to maximize the farmer’s profit. Profits are commonly several times greater than achieved with past recommendations. This enables the farmer to gradually improve her financial capacity to meet needs while gradually increasing fertilizer use to levels where net returns per acre are maximized.
The OFRA project is forming some key partnerships to bring advanced technology to this initiative:
1. AfSIS (The African Soils Information Service) is using ground-level and remote sensing information to map African soils, and linking this with climatic data. OFRA and AFSIS will collaborate to extend information on nutrient response functions across countries borders to areas with similar agro-ecological conditions.
2. GYGA (the UNL led Global Yield Gap Atlas) is fine-tuning extrapolation zones for Africa that will be used for extrapolation of information.
3. The Grameen Foundation supports development of smartphone applications and will collaborate to develop the current computer based optimization tool for use on smart phones which are becoming increasingly common in African rural areas.
“This is an exceptional group of partners whose specialties and experience dovetail well,” said Rebbe Harawa from the AGRA Soil Health Program.