Space to Place

In October 2022, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Bureau for Resilience and Food Security (RFS) launched, through the International Fertilizer Development Center’s (IFDC) Feed the Future Sustainable Opportunities for Improving Livelihoods with Soils (SOILS) program, the 3-year Space to Place initiative to improve fertiliser (nutrient) use efficiency in response to the current fertiliser crisis.

Space to Place is a Pan-African initiative to support farmers' decision-making regarding fertiliser use. The countries of implementation include Madagascar, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda. The concept behind the initiative builds on combining SPACE (top-down information) and PLACE (on-site information) to develop practical, profitable, scale-appropriate fertilizer and land management recommendations.

The overall aim of this initiative is to contribute to increasing yields and incomes in Africa through improved efficiency of fertiliser use, thus improving crop production and reducing agriculture input costs. Also, it aims to bring partners together, reducing the need to reinvent the wheel multiple times in separate countries.

To do so, a Pan-African space-to-place decision support tool (DST) will be deployed. To enhance fertiliser use efficiency across Africa, the ‘space to place’ approach needs to be applicable to a variety of geographies and to all major farming systems with an emphasis on maize mixed, agro-pastoral, and cereal-root crop mixed systems.

The approach will have relevance for regional-level stakeholders (such as policymakers, planners and fertiliser companies) and farm-level stakeholders (farmers, extensionists, service providers). To address the latter, the ‘space to place’ concept will assure relevance of the outcomes for field-level fertility management.

In addition, the platform will be used to continuously incorporate results of new research to provide better input data and further calibrate and validate the models. Thus, there should be continuous improvement in the quality of services.

Objectives

The overall objective of Space to Place is to develop a decision support tool (DST) to enhance fertilier use efficiency among smallholder farmers in Sub-Sahara Africa. This tool will provide science-based information supporting agriculture decision-making at different scales, applicable to a variety farming system in diverse geographies.

The specific objectives for which ISRIC – World Soil Information is doing work within this project are:

• Conduct data collection and data preparation workflows, including databases and data quality assessment. This includes locally collected field trial data; a key component is the digital soil mapping workflow.

• Model engine development: Modelling fertilizer recommendations at large spatial scales (SPACE) and local recommendations based on user inputs and a hyper-localization component (PLACE), calibrated and validated with field trial data.

• Spatial digital infrastructure development: to support the end-to-end workflow and facilitate the generation of robust, multi-country results.

• Web and app development: Web-based front-end with user interaction and results dissemination, scalable towards multi-country roll-out with potential for app development as well.

Activities

To achieve the above objectives, the following activities are carried out:

• Data collection: collect and process necessary input data. This includes identifying potential data gaps and collecting data from local partners.

• DST model engine: develop, test and validate the model engine. An incremental approach is applied wherein elements from the currently used prototype model-train for soil-crop-response will be replaced by more sophisticated models, leading to more accurate and complete predictions in a wider range of scenarios and conditions and of more output variables (yearly crop yield response to fertilisers, soil health response to fertilisers and amendments). Models will be calibrated as much as possible using nationally available data, such as fertiliser trial data, and uncertainties will be quantified.

• Hyper-localised Decision Support: develop the hyper-local component of the DST, allowing for users to add field and farm-specific information in return for optimised, localided and more precise fertiliser recommendations.

• Develop DST’s digital infrastructure and IT components: provide necessary IT framework and processing requirements needed to run the entire workflow and upscale it to a multi-user online webservice.

Deliverables

• Database and digital soil mapping workflows
• Country prototypes (early web browser versions of the DST)
• DST model engine, including hyper-localisation functionality
• Launched online web service DST

Consortium

In alignment with the United States Government’s Feed the Future Initiative and Global Food Security Strategy, this work builds on United States Agency for International Development (USAID) initiatives. USAID is the project's primary funder, and the lead organisation coordinating the work is the International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC).

ISRIC – World Soil Information is a main implementing partner, and we would like to specifically acknowledge the Wageningen modelling group contributing to this work which includes Wageningen University, Wageningen Environmental Research (WENR), and Nutriënt Management Institute (NMI). Other organisations the initiative collaborates with include national and international research organisations, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, the private sector, and civil society organisations.