Heifer International and IBM co-develop a digital platform to help Malawian farmers adapt to environmental shifts and increase crop yield
Malawi is a land of geographical contrasts, with landscapes that range from soaring mountains to flat, dry plains to vast lakes and rivers. Historically, the weather has been equally varied, punctuated by a cool, dry season between May and October and a hot, wet season between November and April. However, in recent years, shifting weather patterns have made the seasons far less predictable.
The unpredictability in weather has a direct impact on the country’s citizens and economy. Malawi has rich, fertile soil, and the majority of the population makes its livelihood through agriculture. One of the predominant crops is groundnut, which helps improve soil fertility and provides food for households, income from both domestic and export sales, and feed for livestock.
Many of the country’s smallholder farmers—those who operate family-owned fields of 10 or fewer hectares—struggle to make ends meet. Insufficient access to affordable credit and markets contributes to an ongoing cycle of poverty. As a result, many farmers don’t have the funds to purchase high-quality seed, so they must resort to planting recycled seed—essentially, grain—that loses potency with each season of use. In addition, many farmers still rely on the radio to receive generalized weather forecasts because they lack access to the hyperlocal weather information that technology can provide.
The Malawi government offers extension services to farmers, providing advice from agricultural experts known as extension workers, on when, how and where to plant, fertilize and harvest crops. However, the ratio of farmers to extension workers is high—approximately one worker for every 1,500–2,000 farmers.
Global nonprofit Heifer International aims to support these farmers. “We help smallholder farmers in developing economies reach sustainable living incomes,” says Antoinette Marie, Director of Heifer Labs, the global digital technology unit of the nonprofit. “We focus on sustainable development, through which, after long-term community engagement, farmers can stand up on their own two feet.”
Elizabeth Magombo-Kabaghe, Innovations and New Initiatives Lead at Heifer International, adds, “We build programs based on communities as they are. Before we start any interventions, we spend time with the communities to gain an understanding of their way of life.”
Early on, Heifer’s leadership understood the importance of providing support to farmers from before the start of the season through harvest and beyond, with the goal of increasing yield so farmers could earn a livable income. Doing so, especially after the outbreak of Covid, required accelerated adoption of digital solutions to help boost crop yield and enhance market competitiveness.
In 2021, Heifer joined the IBM® Sustainability Accelerator, an IBM social innovation program that supports communities facing environmental and economic stress around the world, through technologies like AI and an ecosystem of experts. Focusing on the Malawi region, Heifer worked with IBM to build and develop OpenHarvest, an open-source platform that provides farmers with task-based recommendations for each stage of the crop cycle.
Heifer had two primary goals in undertaking the project. “We wanted to take an innovative approach to digital extension services,” says Marie. “We not only wanted to reach farmers at scale with specific agronomic recommendations, but we also wanted to tackle the issue of behavioral change and market linkages.”
As the first step of the IBM Sustainability Accelerator program, Heifer and IBM conducted a series of design thinking sessions in which the two organizations began developing a technology strategy for the project. As part of the focus of the IBM Sustainability Accelerator on working with end users to build solutions that serve their needs, Heifer then held a second set of sessions with the farmers themselves. This was key to helping engage the farmers in the shift from an experiential to a data-driven way of farming.
As the rainy season drew near, Heifer collaborated with IBM Consulting® and other IBM business units using the IBM Garage™ method, IBM's collaborative engagement model that combines people, processes and technology. “We came together in our approach for surfacing design requirements and integrating them into backlogs, doing sprints and then deploying and testing updates in the field,” says Marie. “By the end of the IBM Sustainability Accelerator, it no longer felt like the Heifer team and the IBM team, but just one team.”
“That’s when things became really generative,” she continues. “Not only were we addressing feature requirements but also tackling programmatic challenges and ideating other areas of value we could deliver through the solution.”
The resulting, enhanced OpenHarvest solution combines technology with community participation. It consists of the OpenHarvest administrative platform running on IBM Cloud® as well as a mobile app for community facilitators—local farmers who advise other farmers on what to plant and when—out in the field.
The solution leverages AI-powered IBM Environmental Intelligence APIs to gather and analyze data from various sources: real-time, hyperlocal weather forecasting, soil moisture and composition data from a local soil testing center, and data collected by community facilitators. The system then generates recommendations for each farmer, such as when to plant, how much fertilizer to use and when to harvest. Because most farmers don’t have smartphones, they receive the recommendations as SMS messages on their feature phones. The system also uses machine learning techniques, particularly clustering, to predict when specific recommendations will be triggered throughout the farming season, allowing administrators to plan and allocate resources such as seeds, fertilizers and so on more efficiently.
Heifer needs to ensure farmers follow through on the recommendations in order to determine what’s working and what isn’t. To encourage farmers do so and foster data-driven farming practices, the Heifer team set up an incentive program where farmers get a verifiable digital record of their field operations. The top ten farmers with the highest yield were rewarded with 40 kgs of groundnut seed, which is enough to plant on one acre.
Community facilitators visit the farms, collect and label relevant data, and take photos through the app on their smartphones. Agriculture students from a local university then analyze the photos to verify that the recommendations have been applied. By participating in the program, farmers can gain access to sources of affordable credit with which to purchase high-quality seed and supplies.
The IBM Sustainability Accelerator project with Heifer International concluded in 2023. The crop yield from the pilot showed promising results. With many of the participants supporting households averaging five people, the project directly helped the beneficiaries and their families increase their crop yield.
The impact has already created life-changing opportunities for some farmers. According to one farmer, the program enabled him to access loans for the first time, so he could buy certified seed instead of using recycled seed. He was also able to tap into previously inaccessible extension services and receive recommendations through SMS messages on his phone, which he subsequently implemented.
His harvest was so successful that he was able to buy uniforms for his children, clothes for his wife and enough maize—the staple food source in Malawi—to keep his family food secure this year. In addition, he now has capital to invest in his business, hire help and increase the efficiency of his farm.
There are other stories of positive impact as well. “One farmer has constructed two shops, bought four pigs, and plans to start a small grocery shop,” says Magombo-Kabaghe. “He’s been able to pay the school fees for his children and has reserved funds to buy fertilizer for the upcoming season. Another farmer was living in a mud and grass-thatched house and has now constructed a brick house. She is hoping to put on an iron roof with money from this season.”
Heifer’s participation in the IBM Sustainability Accelerator program has ended its two-year run, but their work with Malawi farmers is just getting started. Looking toward the future, Heifer is evaluating the integration of AI models into the solution, making use of data collected through and entered into the platform. The organization is also looking into automating some functions, such as recommendation verification, which is currently done by students.
The success of the project demonstrates the transformative power data and digital technologies can have in bringing sustainable agricultural development to underserved communities. It’s an approach based on the environmental and humanitarian values Heifer and IBM share—one that has the potential to change the world, one farm at a time.
Since 1944, Heifer International (link resides outside of ibm.com) has worked with more than 52 million people around the world to end hunger and poverty in a sustainable way. Heifer currently operates in 19 countries across Africa, Asia and the Americas, including the United States, supporting farmers and food producers to strengthen local economies and build secure livelihoods that provide a living income.
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