Drones, aquaponics systems, solar power water desalinization, LED-lit farms with optimized photosynthesis and digital soil mapping. That’s the list of top five innovations in agriculture for 2015. How many of these are applied in Africa? And how many of these are applied on a large scale in smallholder farming?
Innovation is crucial for development. We already know a lot about how to achieve high yields in a resource-efficient and nature-nourishing way. Yet in Africa, where more than half of the population is employed in agriculture and the land is rich and arable, the uptake of new agri tech is rather low.