Despite her best efforts, unpredictable temperatures, humidity and air quality changes led to the deaths of thousands of chicks, a lesson that would propel her to commit her life to making African farms more climate-resilient.

“Nigeria’s unprecedented rainfalls and weather patterns are not predictable, and with heat and cold stresses our birds were dying,” the 34-year-old agricultural engineer said in a telephone interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“We understand that innovation is pivotal to combating climate-related issues around food insecurity,” she said.

Akpagbula last year launched a remote-sensing device called PenKeep that monitors and controls environmental conditions in poultry farms. She is now extending the technology into aquaculture and greenhouse farms.

Alongside container farms in South Africa cultivating soldier flies for animal feed, solar-powered fish and crop dryers in Tanzania and machine-learning pest detectors in Kenya, Africans are coming up with innovative solutions to overcome the effects of climate change on food production.

Such solutions are going to be needed as Africa, according to a new United Nations report, is the continent most impacted by hunger.

Together with conflict and economic crises, climate shocks are leaving Africa at the epicentre of a hunger crisis, with one in five – some 300 million people – short of food.

It is also the continent most vulnerable to climate shocks, while contributing the least to carbon emissions.

“Current societal inequalities, such as resource constraints, make it even more difficult to source funds to adapt to these changes,” said Mulako Kabisa, from the Global Change Institute research platform at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

“Home-grown solutions matter because they take into cognizance the local context … and what will be sustainable in the long run,” she said in emailed comments.

Sensors and solar

PenKeep’s solar-powered device interprets data from sensors that monitor environmental changes including temperature, water levels and air quality in poultry coops. Farmers are alerted of condition changes through SMS, email or an alarm.

It is being used by more than 1,200 chicken farmers in western and northern Nigeria, with more than 100,000 chickens monitored in the company’s first six months. Subscriptions of around $15 a month make it more affordable for farmers, Akpagbula said.

Users can also use an artificial intelligence (AI) management app called FS Manager that provides farmers with information including management advice, weather updates and book-keeping services.

“Nigeria has millions of poultry farmers … but they are not producing enough … because they are spending so much on energy and they have a lot of poultry mortality as a result of their environment,” said Akpagbula.

Farmers using PenKeep have seen poultry mortality rates decrease by 72 per cent, Akpagbula said.

In east Africa, Tanzanian Evodius Rutta also utilizes the continent’s abundance of sun through his MAVUNOLAB Solar Dryer that helps subsistence fish processors and farmers rapidly dry out produce including fish, fruits and vegetables, preventing post-harvest food loss.

Small-scale fish processors at Lake Victoria in western Tanzania have begun using his dryer, reducing the drying time of 250 kg of fish from 12 hours to four.

Climate variability has led to erratic rains that can spoil up to 50 per cent of fishermen’s harvests as they do not have access to cold storage, said Rutta, a sustainability researcher and MAVUNOLAB innovation hub founder.

“Because of the rains and high tides, it has also become very dangerous for fishermen that go to the sea and the lakes,” Rutta, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview.

“We need low-cost solutions for farmers to adapt to changing climate patterns because it’s going to be unavoidable,” Rutta said, adding that he was getting requests from farmers in Zimbabwe, Uganda and Kenya to use his invention.

Pest detection

Climate change can impact environmental factors such as temperature and humidity that can in turn influence the life cycle and spread of crop pests, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

Pests are already responsible for at least 40 per cent of crop loss worldwide.

Kenyan computer scientist Esther Kimani witnessed this first-hand growing up when pests decimated up to one-third of her family’s pea, potato and maize crops in the south of Kenya.

By the time the pests were detected, the destruction was so severe that even using pesticides became pointless.

Kimani was inspired to invent the Early Crop Pest and Disease Detection Device – a solar-powered tool that uses AI and machine learning-enabled cameras to rapidly detect and alert farmers of pests and diseases.

Kimani’s invention is being used by more than 5,000 farmers across Kenya since its launch in 2020. A group-leasing model reduces the cost to each farmer to $3 per month.

The device also advises farmers about which pesticides to use when, according to predicted climatic changes.

Kimani estimates that more than 3,000 acres of land have been protected from pest infestation by her invention.

She recently won the Royal Academy of Engineering’s African Prize for Engineering Innovation, for which Akpagbula and Rutta were also short-listed.

Climate crisis

Some home-grown innovations are also focusing on protecting agricultural output while reducing carbon emissions.

South Africa’s Philafeed helps build tailor-made black soldier fly container farms. The fly larvae feed on food waste, diverting planet-heating methane emissions from landfills.

The larvae can also be used as a protein feed for livestock, reducing the need for carbon-intensive soya and fish meal.

The larvae manure, a byproduct known as frass, helps increase soil and plant tolerance against drought and flooding, and in turn can increase crop yield in times of climate uncertainty.

“Through black soldier flies we want farmers to be able to diversify their income if there is a failed season due to climate change,” said Maya Zaken, Philafeed co-founder.

Philafeed is currently piloting its new container model in Cape Town.

Despite initial funding challenges and struggles to get farmer buy-in, Akpagbula has faith that her innovation, alongside others on the continent, will soon become essential to farmers as climate shocks become more severe and more frequent.

“People always say why now? Why you doing this now?” said Akpagbula. “I tell them it’s because of the urgency of the climate crisis.”

—The Thomson Reuters Foundation is the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters. 

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The continent is facing its worst food crisis ever, with more than one in five Africans — a record 278 million people — facing hunger, according to United Nations estimates.

A major theme of the three-day summit in the Senegalese capital Dakar was that African countries need to boost their food production capacity rather than relying on imports that have left them vulnerable to price spikes and shortages.

The meeting brought together African leaders, development banks and international partners including the United States, the European Union and Britain to mobilize funding and political commitment.

Around 40 countries from across the continent presented agricultural development plans to the bank and other partners, who pledged support for the plans over the next five years to enable the countries to increase food production.

“We’re going to invest in markets, we are going to invest in infrastructure, energy, we’re going to invest in roads, we’re going to invest in storage, all the things that you need to make agriculture work,” African Development Bank president Akinwumi Adesina told Reuters in an interview.

“We must make sure that agriculture allows people to feed themselves. That’s the core of what we are doing here. It’s embarrassing that Africa is not able to feed itself,” Adesina said.

Heavy debt burdens from the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, which raised prices of fuel, grain and edible oils, have added to long-term causes of food insecurity such as climate change and conflict, experts say.

The Ukraine war also disrupted the supply of fertilizer to the continent, pushing prices beyond the reach of farmers.

The bank last year reached a deal and got assurances from fertilizer manufacturers on the continent including Nigeria’s Dangote and Indorama, and Morocco’s OCP that Africa will not be marginalized in the fertilizer supply chain, Adesina said, adding that the bank had made investments in the manufacturers.

“I think we will not have a fertilizer crisis in Africa. The challenge we’re going to have is affordability problem,” he said, adding that governments would have to put support measures in place to make fertilizer affordable for farmers.

— Bate Felix is Reuters’ bureau chief for West and Central Africa, based at Dakar; writing by Nellie Peyton.

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Dmitry Medvedev, who served as president from 2008 to 2012 and is now deputy secretary of Russia’s security council, said he would like to outline “some simple but important points about food security in Russia,” given the sanctions imposed.

Most of them have been part of the country’s agricultural policy for years.

“We will only be supplying food and agriculture products to our friends,” Medvedev said on social media. “Fortunately we have plenty of them, and they are not in Europe or North America at all.”

Russia already supplies wheat mainly to Africa and the Middle East. The European Union and Ukraine are its main competitors in the wheat trade.

The priority in food supply is Russia’s domestic market and price control within it, Medvedev said. Russia has been using grain export quotas and taxes since 2021 to try to stabilize high domestic food inflation.

Agriculture supplies to “friends” will be both in roubles and their national currency in agreed proportion, Medvedev said.

Currency of payment can already vary in each grain export contract subject to the needs of buyers and sellers. However, Medvedev’s remark comes after Russia’s recent demand for foreign buyers to pay for Russian gas in roubles.

Russia banned most Western food imports in 2014 when it annexed Crimea from Ukraine but may expand the list further now, Medvedev added.

Many foreign companies, such as producers of chocolate, halted sales of their brands in Russia last month.

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The European Union, the United States and Britain are among those tightening border controls as researchers probe whether the mutation is vaccine-resistant.

Duclos told reporters that Canada was acting quickly to protect the health of its citizens. The seven nations are South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Botswana, Eswatini, Zimbabwe and Mozambique.

Foreign citizens will be banned from Canada if they have been to the seven nations in the last 14 days.

Canadians returning to Canada will need to be tested before being allowed back in. Any Canadian citizen or permanent resident who has been to the countries in question and is already back in Canada will have to take a COVID-19 test and then go into quarantine for 14 days.

Canada has seen no sign of the variant, named omicron, chief medical officer Theresa Tam told reporters.

— Reporting for Reuters by David Ljunggren in Ottawa.

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A renewable fuel push under U.S. President Joe Biden’s climate agenda is set to trigger a boom in soyoil use, reinforcing a worldwide picture of rising consumption of staple crops driven by China, Dan Basse, president of consultancy AgResource Co., told the GrainCom conference in Geneva.

At the same time, combined global yields of major grain crops appear to have levelled out in the past five years, he said.

“We need more acres,” he said.

However, U.S. planted acreage may have reached a ceiling, Basse said, adding further cropland growth would need to occur primarily in South America, Africa and the Black Sea region.

For renewable diesel, U.S. production capacity is set to double in the coming year as over one billion gallons in capacity comes onstream, he said.

With U.S. states barring companies from using imported feedstocks for such fuel, that could in theory create the need for an additional 40 million acres of soybean plantings in the United States, Basse said.

“I don’t think there is any way America can shift 40 million acres to soybeans from other crops, but you’re going to see some sort of shift,” he said.

In China, demand for livestock feed, partly due to a rebuilding of the country’s pig herd after a disease epidemic, has supported record grain imports.

AgResource estimates Chinese imports of feed grains reached nearly 54 million tonnes in 2020 — or about one in every four tonnes of feed grain traded worldwide — and will rise to a new record of almost 57 million tonnes in 2021, Basse said.

— Reporting for Reuters by Gus Trompiz.

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The findings, published in the October issue of Nature Genetics, emerged from a collaborative effort to sequence the genomes of 172 indigenous cattle by scientists at the Addis Ababa- and Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), Seoul National University (Republic of Korea), Rural Development Agency (RDA, Republic of Korea), University of Khartoum (Sudan), The Centre of Tropical Livestock Genetics and Health (CTLGH, Scotland), Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (Sweden), and the University of Nottingham (United Kingdom). They wanted to learn how — after spending thousands of years confined to a shifting patchwork of sub-regions in Africa — cattle rapidly evolved during the last millennia with traits that allowed them to thrive across the continent.

“We believe these insights can be used to breed a new generation of African cattle that have some of the qualities of European and American livestock — which produce more milk and meat per animal—but with the rich mosaic of traits that make African cattle more resilient and sustainable,” said Olivier Hanotte, Principal Scientist at ILRI, Professor of Genetics at the University of Nottingham and Program Leader at CTLGH, who led the work at ILRI.

Hanotte and his colleagues engaged in a sort of “genomic time travel” that, for the first time, allowed scientists to retrace the genetic journey that has made African cattle so adaptable. They discovered what co-author Steve Kemp, Head of ILRI’s LiveGene program and Deputy Director of CTLGH described as an “evolutionary jolt” that occurred 750 to 1050 years ago: the arrival of Asian cattle breeds in East Africa carrying genetic traits that would make cattle production possible in diverse and demanding African environments.

The genome sequencing work yielded evidence that Indigenous pastoralist herders began breeding the Asian cattle, known as Zebu, with local breeds of cattle known as Taurine. In particular, the Zebu offered traits that would allow cattle to survive in hot, dry climates typical in the Horn of Africa. But by crossing the two, the new animals that emerged also retained the capacity of the Taurines to endure humid climates where vector-borne diseases like trypanosomiasis are common.

“Livestock — especially cattle — can be controversial, but without them, millions of people in Africa would have been forced to hunt wildlife for protein,” said co-author Ally Okeyo Mwai, a principal scientist at ILRI who leads its African Dairy Genetic Gains program. “That would have been devastating for the African environment and its incredible diversity of wildlife.”

It is now important to use the full range of natural genetic endowments that have made African cattle so resilient to sustainably meet Africa’s surging demand for milk and meat, while minimizing negative impacts of increased livestock production. For many households in Africa, and especially the poorest, livestock in general and cattle, in particular, continue to be a family’s most valuable asset. They provide a critical source of protein and micronutrients alongside income to pay for things like school fees. They also provide manure for crops, and some African cattle breeds can survive in conditions that can’t support food crops, offering farmers a potential adaptation strategy for coping with climate change.

“We’re fortunate that pastoralists are such skilled breeders,” Hanotte said. “They left a valuable roadmap for efforts underway at ILRI and elsewhere to balance livestock productivity in Africa with resilience and sustainability.”

“You can see from studying the genomes of indigenous cattle that breeding for environmental adaptation has been the key to successful livestock production in Africa,” said Kemp. “And that has to be the factored in our future efforts to develop more productive, more sustainable animals. If the goal is pure productivity, you’re doomed to fail.”

“It’s important to understand that livestock breeding has long played a vital role in sustaining the health and wealth of African communities,” said ILRI Director General Jimmy Smith. “The focus on breeding for resilience that guided past efforts provides a touchstone for future work to chart a sustainable path for livestock production in sub-Saharan Africa.”

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) is a non-profit institution helping people in low- and middle-income countries to improve their lives, livelihoods and lands through the animals that remain the backbone of small-scale agriculture and enterprise across the developing world. ILRI is a CGIAR research centre co-hosted by Kenya and Ethiopia and with 14 other offices across Africa and Asia.

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The world’s leading farm equipment maker is outfitting its tractors with startup Hello Tractor’s technology, which allows farmers to hail the machines via an app, monitors the vehicles’ movements and transmits usage information such as fuel levels.

The aim is to help the U.S. company boost sales of its famous green-and-yellow John Deere tractors, a tough task in a continent with the world’s highest poverty rate and the least mechanized agricultural sector.

Deere is currently testing the technology — a small black box fitted beneath dashboards — on around 400 tractors in Ghana and Kenya. It told Reuters it plans to roll out the devices across Africa in the second half of this year, offering it to all contractors who buy its equipment on the continent.

Jacques Taylor, who heads John Deere’s sub-Saharan Africa business, said that the continent badly needs more machinery to develop its farming industry but most farmers don’t have the scale to justify a large investment.

“We would like to see that every farmer has access to mechanization,” he told Reuters. “The gap that we’ve identified is, how do we connect small farmers with tractor owners?”

Deere declined to comment on the investment costs for the rollout. The risks are clear; there is no certainty of any measure of success in Africa, which accounts for a tiny fraction of its global sales at present.

Held back by low incomes, tiny landholdings as well as a lack of bank financing, tractor numbers have long been stagnant on the continent, even as much of the developing world has experienced a boom in mechanization.

Deere thinks it can help on the financing front: it told Reuters it could pull data from the Hello Tractor platform that showed in precise detail how farmers were using its equipment.

That information, it said, could be used by the farmers — who typically lack credit histories — to help secure bank loans.

This would mean they could buy more tractors.

Opportunity knocks?

In central Kenya, a Deere tractor zig-zagged across a sun-drenched field, raking up dry grass and dropping bales of hay. The black box monitored its every move.

The tractor belongs to Agrimech Africa, a Nairobi-based agricultural services firm that has taken up the offer to have the devices installed on its Deere machinery.

“They do the technology. We do the management,” said Pascal Kaumbutho, who heads the company.

Agrimech, which is paid by farmers to work their land, hopes the new tech will help optimise its Deere tractors and connect them to new customers, allowing it to expand.

Kaumbutho, whose company manages a dozen tractors, envisions a future in which Agrimech runs a 1,000-strong fleet. “Right now, we’re reaching about 1,500 farmers,” he said. “Within the next two or three years, I’d like to reach 20,000.”

Such opportunities exist in markets across Africa, said Hello Tractor founder Jehiel Oliver, but companies like Deere have lacked the tools to develop them.

“Nigeria alone needs 750,000 (more) tractors to be on the global average,” he said. “Our technology is a market-maker for tractor manufacturers who want to sell into those markets.”

Deere’s annual revenue of about $40 billion is dominated by the Americas and Europe (all figures US$). It doesn’t break out numbers for Africa, but combined revenue from Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand and the Middle East was $3.9 billion last year.

Finance frustration

Outside South Africa, the continent’s most developed economy, around 80 per cent of African cropland is still cultivated by hand. Yields are half the global average. With its population set to double by 2050, increasing productivity is a necessity.

One of the biggest barriers to mechanization is finance; though agriculture accounts for around a quarter of Africa’s economic output and some 70 per cent of jobs, banks often view farmers as high-risk because of the lack of credit histories.

“It’s one thing to go to a bank and say ‘You know. Hey, I work very hard.’ It’s another thing to be able to show it,” Kaumbutho said.

Deere said the data from the Hello Tractor platform shows how often equipment is in use, how much land it’s working, and whether it’s tilling, planting or harvesting. That information can be used to create financial statements, it added.

Tshepo Maeko, vice-president and head of agrisales at South African-based lender Absa, sees potential to unlock more lending in this kind of technology which gives banks a fuller picture.

“We will be able to see how big the risk is or how big the opportunity is,” he said.

Deere is working with Hello Tractor and the banks to format the data to create easily digestible automated reports. No loan decisions have yet been made based on the information.

But Antois van der Westhuizen, John Deere Financial’s managing director for sub-Saharan Africa, said that should be possible by the time the scheme is rolled out across Africa.

“The banking systems are trying to adapt,” he said. “It’s a journey for us to really get them to understand it.”

— Reporting for Reuters by Omar Mohammed, writing by Joe Bavier.

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Hundreds of millions of the voracious insects have swept across Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya in what the U.N. has called the worst outbreak in a quarter of a century, with Uganda, Eritrea and Djibouti also affected.

Authorities in those countries are already carrying out aerial spraying of pesticides, but experts say the scale of the infestation is beyond local capacity as desert locusts can travel up to 150 km in a day.

They threaten to increase food shortages in a region where up to 25 million people are reeling from three consecutive years of droughts and floods, say aid agencies.

Keith Cressman, senior locust forecasting officer at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), said specially developed prototypes would be tested that can detect swarms via special sensors and adapt their speed and height accordingly.

“Nobody’s ever done this with desert locusts before. So we have no proven methodology for using drones for spraying on locusts,” said Cressman.

“There are already small atomizer sprayers made for drones. But with locusts, we just don’t know how high and how fast to fly.”

The swarms — one reportedly measuring 40 km by 60 km — have already devoured tens of thousands of hectares of crops, such as maize, sorghum and teff, and ravaged pasture for livestock.

By June, the fast-breeding locusts could grow by 500 times and move into South Sudan.

The impact on the region’s food supply could be enormous — a locust swarm of a square kilometre is able to eat the same amount of food in one day as 35,000 people, says the FAO.

Can drones work?

Climate scientists say global warming may be behind the current infestations, which have also hit parts of Iran, India and Pakistan.

Warmer seas have resulted in a rise in the frequency of cyclones in the Indian Ocean. This caused heavy downpours along the Arabian peninsula, creating ideal conditions for locust breeding in the deserts of Oman, Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

Researchers are increasingly looking to technology to help provide early warning signs and control locust outbreaks amid fears climate change could bring more cyclones.

Officials in Kenya say drones could play an important role given the limited number of aircraft.

“Every county wants an aircraft, but we have only have five at the moment and they can only be in one location at one time,” said David Mwangi, head of plant protection at Kenya’s ministry of agriculture.

“We have not used drones before, but I think it’s worth testing them as they could help.”

Existing drone models are restricted in terms of the volumes they can carry and the distances they can cover due to their size and limited battery life, say entomologists and plant protection researchers.

Another challenge for drone use in such emergencies is the lack of regulation. Many east African countries are still in the early stages of drafting laws, prohibiting usage unless in exceptional circumstances and with strict approvals.

That makes it harder to deploy larger drones, which have petrol-powered engines capable of carrying tanks of up to 1,500 litres and travelling distances of up to 500 km, and often require special approval.

Drones can also be used in the aftermath of an infestation.

“The other use case for drones is in post-disaster mapping,” said Kush Gadhia from Astral Aerial Solutions, a Kenyan firm that seeks to use drones to address development challenges.

“Governments need to know the extent of the damage afterwards. Combining larger satellite maps with smaller drone maps — which provide higher resolution images — will give more accurate assessments on the extent crop loss and health.”

— Reporting by Nita Bhalla for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s and LGBT+ rights, human trafficking, property rights and climate change.

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The southern African desert nation moved closer to famine last month after dam levels fell below 20 per cent, a drop officials blame on climate change and the worst drought in almost a century that also hit South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Meatco acting chairperson Ronald Kubas told Reuters on Tuesday that his company had recently visited Botswana and that buying cattle from there made sense because Botswana had the same animal health standards as Namibia.

Namibia became the second African country after South Africa to meet China’s stringent import conditions for bone-in beef last year.

China’s massive population has seen its appetite for beef grow after an outbreak of African swine fever wiped out hundreds of millions of pigs.

Namibia currently exports 10,000 tonnes of beef a year to the European Union.

A five-year drought in southern Africa has caused plunging dam levels in Zambia and Zimbabwe which have resulted in power cuts. In parts of South Africa, people have been drilling boreholes and trucking in water.

— Reporting for Reuters by Nyasha Nyaungwa.

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