Increase Crop Yields Through Digital Innovation

Smallholder farms support more than two billion people worldwide and account for nearly 75 percent of the world’s poorest earners. Many of these households rely on inefficient and environmentally unsustainable agricultural practices.

The Precision Development (PxD) team explains how we can improve yields and incomes for 100+ million farmers, as well as develop more resilient food systems, by creating a global innovation pipeline for digital-enabled agricultural solutions. They propose USAID invests in a suite of digital agriculture innovations like their evidence-based solutions which are already delivering results in nine countries and ready to be scaled up to more.

We sat down with the PxD team to learn about the inspiration behind their initiative, which seeks to improve the lives of more than 100 million smallholder farmers and contributes to United Nations Development Goals 1 and 2; no poverty and zero hunger by 2030.  

“We hope to unlock partnerships and investment in digital agriculture innovation to improve the lives of more than 100 million smallholder farmers and their households by addressing the complex, inter-related challenges of rural poverty, food security, and climate change.”

~ Jonathan Lehe, PxD

UA: What inspired your moonshot idea?

PxD: Smallholder farmers often fail to maximize what they can harvest and what they can subsequently earn. Typically, the smallholder farmers only harvest 30-50% of what their land could produce, losing track of their risk-adjusted net incomes and face trade-offs between yields and incomes. Climate change presents significant challenges to all farmers, and they are limited with the amount of tools they must adapt to and mitigate the damage that the climate causes.  There are numerous agricultural practices, inputs, and technologies available that could dramatically improve farmers’ yields, incomes, and environmental sustainability, but adoption of these solutions remains low, mainly due to farmers’ lack of knowledge regarding the situation. This disparity on knowledge has been an influence on the last 20 years of farmers’ development, with there being a significant rise in digital tools - such as mobile phone penetration - that have the potential to democratize access to information and dramatically improve farmers' lives as well as improve food security and support climate change adaptation and mitigation. 

UA: What is the impact you hope to make?

PxD: We hope to unlock partnerships and investment in digital agriculture innovation to improve the lives of more than 100 million smallholder farmers and their households by addressing the complex, inter-related challenges of rural poverty, food security, and climate change.

UA: Looking ahead to 2023, what are you hopeful about?

PxD: We are hopeful that 2023 will bring continued momentum towards a large ecosystem of organizations and stakeholders that are working to advance digital agriculture and make progress towards innovation in agriculture. This would include Precision Development (PxD), Digital Green, One Acre Fund, the Commission on Innovation for Climate Change, Food Security, and Agriculture, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID, IFAD, low-and middle-income country governments, and many others. More broadly, we are extremely hopeful that sustained progress towards global development is financed and implemented through reforms such as the proposed Fostering Innovation in the Global Development Act (FIGDA).