Kaniz Tamanna is a machinery development officer with CIMMYT’s Sustainable Agrifood Systems (SAS) program in Bangladesh. She works on the Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia – Mechanization and Extension Activity (CSISA-MEA) project, with responsibility to provide technical support to the agriculture based light engineering workshops. At CIMMYT, she is excited to have the opportunity to research different locally demanded agricultural machines such as jute decorticator machines, fodder chopper machines, onion and garlic planters, onion seed separators, and others.
Tamanna is a proud agricultural engineer, who graduated from Bangladesh Agricultural University in the department of Farm Power and Machinery. She has three publications in national level journals on rice reaper machines, rice transplanter machines and ice crusher machines for raw fish storage.
Tamanna also worked as a technical officer under a project funded by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) at Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh.
A. N. M. Arifur Rahman is a machinery development officer with CIMMYT’s Sustainable Agrifood Systems (SAS) program in Bangladesh. He is currently working within the agricultural machinery and light engineering sector and is proud to be a member of the CIMMYT family.
Before joining CIMMYT, Rahman worked with Rangpur Dinajpur Rural Service (RDRS) Bangladesh under European Union funded projects and with ACI Motors on agricultural machinery, research and development, extension, scaling up mechanization, value chains and market systems.
Rahman is a proud agricultural engineer, graduated from the Bangladesh Agricultural University with a major in farm power and machinery. He has three national publications on agricultural machinery and additional experience in training, climate smart mechanization, people with disabilities, gender, and emergency responses on floods or natural disasters.
K.M. Zasim Uddin is an agricultural development officer with CIMMYT’s Sustainable Agrifood Systems (SAS) program in Bangladesh. He has a masters in agronomy from Rajshahi University
He is part of projects including the Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia (CSISA), Fall Armyworm R4D and Management (FAW), Big data analytics for climate-smart agricultural practices in South Asia (Big Data² CSA), and Climate Services for Resilient Development in South Asia (CSRD). His main responsibilities are research and development on agricultural mechanization for the CSISA Mechanization and Extension Activity (CSISA-MEA). He has participated in versatile training, workshops and conference programs across Asia.
Uddin has worked in different national and international non-government organizations and companies for more than 13 years, including in research and development at Syngenta Bangladesh Limited and on the Borga Chasi Unnayan Program at BRAC. He also worked as an agriculture officer under the Char Livelihood Program, funded by the United Kingdom Department for International Development.
Md. Abdul Mabud is a plant pathologist (mycology) working as an agricultural development officer with CIMMYT’s Sustainable Agrifood Systems (SAS) program in Bangladesh. He carries out research and extension work within maize and wheat-based cropping systems with a focus on different innovative crop management practices and technologies, such as agricultural mechanization, better bet agronomy, and conservation agriculture techniques.
He started his professional life in livelihood development projects and directly worked for organizations supporting children, adolescent women, new mothers, and marginal farmers in rural communities in agricultural development to improve their livelihoods. Mabud also worked on the Food Security for Sustainable Household Livelihood (FoSHoL) project implemented by Action Aid, the Livelihoods Empowerment & Agroforestry (LEAF) project implemented by Intercooperation, the Social & Economic Empowerment of Ultra Poor (SEEUP) project implemented by NETZ & BMZ, and the Sustainable Household Ability to Respond to Development Opportunities (SHOUHARDO) project implemented by CARE.
Azahar Ali Miah is a senior monitoring, evaluation and learning officer with CIMMYT’s Sustainable Agrifood Systems (SAS) project in Bangladesh.
Before joining CIMMYT in 2009, he worked with different development organizations, including projects funded by the World Bank, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), the United Kingdom Department for International Development, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). He also has six years’ experience in the Bangladesh Army.
Miah has a strong ability to identify community strengths and weaknesses from field data collections. He is an excellent team builder and motivator with honed communication and analytical thinking skills. He has seven publications in national and international journals, and is an agricultural economist with an MBA.
Subash Adhikari is an agricultural machinery engineer in CIMMYT’s Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia (CSISA) project in Nepal, which aims to strengthen cereal systems through using improved technology in seed variety, management and mechanization. The project is currently working on its Covid response, helping returned migrants and vulnerable and marginalized groups to access the financial and technical assistance necessary for their livelihood in agriculture production.
Adhikari started his career as a field research technician and conducted several research projects on the validation of agricultural machinery in Terai, Nepal. He later worked in the promotion and scaling of the machinery.
Adhikari is currently working to involve the private sector as a major partner in promoting technology and developing mechanics for repairing machinery with minimum help from the development project. He is interested in mapping machinery, photography and work management.
Mustafa Kamal is a GIS and remote sensing analyst in CIMMYT, leading the GIS, remote sensing and data team in Bangladesh as part of the Sustainable Agrifood Systems (SAS) program’s Innovation Sciences in Agroecosystems and Food Systems theme across Asia.
Kamal’s core expertise is in earth observation and geospatial data science, scientific and cloud computing, webGIS, Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), advance landcover-landuse classification, and tool development. He contributes to research and innovation of irrigation and agro-meteorological advisory, crop identification and yield prediction, disaster and crop monitoring, landscape diversity, and climate analytics. He has published many peer-reviewed papers, reports, and training manuals, and provided teaching/training.
Kamal’s interdisciplinary background in urban and rural planning and disaster management helps him to integrate and lead an interdisciplinary team to provide solutions for sustainable agrifood systems.
Khandakar Shafiqul Islam is a hub coordinator with CIMMYT in Bangladesh. He is responsible for implementing different projects at field level involving government, non-government and private sector organizations, along with managing resources.
Asif Al Faisal is a data analyst with CIMMYT in Bangladesh. He is an expert in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning modeling, graph representation learning, algorithms, agro-geospatial analysis and data visualization.
Sieg Snapp is the director of the Sustainable Agrifood Systems program at CIMMYT, which brings together global agricultural economics, systems analysis on agrifood innovations and agricultural systems for development in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
As a Professor of Soils and Cropping Systems Ecology at Michigan State University and Associate Director of the Center for Global Change and Earth Observations, she led research on sustainable farming, particularly for cereal-based, rainfed systems in Africa and North America.
Snapp first partnered with CIMMYT in 1993, when she developed the “mother and baby” trial design. This go-to tool for participatory research has developed farmer-approved technologies in 30 countries.
Snapp has partnered with local and international scientists to tackle sustainable development goals, improve livelihoods and farm sustainably. Her two hundred publications and text books address co-learning, ecological intensification and open data to generate relevant science.
Md. Harun-Or-Rashid is an Agricultural Development Officer working with CIMMYT’s Sustainable Agrifood Systems (SAS) program. He conducts research and outreach within maize- and wheat-based cropping systems, with an emphasis on various cutting-edge crop management techniques and technologies, such as conservation agriculture, machine learning, crop modeling, integrated pest management, GIS, and remote sensing methods.
In India, nearly one-sixth of groundwater reserves has been overexploited and almost one-fifth of them is either in critical or semi-critical condition. For a country that relies heavily on groundwater for drinking and irrigation, these statistics are close to a death sentence.
India’s water crisis, however, is not unique in the region. Population growth, coupled with increasing urbanization and industrialization, has made South Asia, one of the most heavily irrigated areas on earth, highly vulnerable to water stress. Moreover, as the effects of climate change are increasingly felt in those countries, agricultural production, even at the current level, may not be sustainable.
Against this background, ensuring that water resources are used efficiently and sustainably is key to meet the world’s growing demand. Over the last decades, traditional systems of irrigation have given way to more efficient drip irrigation systems that deliver the right amount of water and nutrients to the plant’s root zone. But as farm labor shortages become more severe, investing in automated irrigation systems — which promise increased production rates and product quality — will be the only way to ensure the sustainability of agricultural production systems worldwide.
A new article co-authored by a team of researchers from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and the Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology synthesizes the available information related to the automation of drip irrigation systems and explores recent advances in the science of wireless sensor networks (WSN), the internet of things (IoT) and other communication technologies that increase production capacity while reducing costs.
“Bundling both elements — drip irrigation and automation — in water application can lead to large savings in irrigation and boost water efficiency, especially in high water-consuming, cereal-based systems like the Indo-Gangetic Plains,” explained M.L. Jat, a principal scientist at CIMMYT and one of the authors of the review.
Investing in data and youth
Smart irrigation technologies, including sensors and the IoT, allow farmers to take informed decisions to improve the quality and quantity of their crops, providing them with site-specific data on factors like soil moisture, nutrient status, weed pressure or soil acidity.
However, this information is still limited to certain soil types and crops. “To upgrade drip irrigation systems elsewhere, especially in ‘water-stressed’ regions, we need additional agricultural background data in those areas,” Jat pointed out. “That’s the only way we can effectively customize innovations to each scenario, as one size does not fit all.”
Making this data available to and readable by farmers is also essential. Here, young people can become very good allies, as they tend to be more technologically savvy and used to working with large volumes of information. “Not only are they more skilled to integrate agricultural data into decision-making, but they can also help older farmers adopt and trust intelligent irrigation systems,” Jat concluded.
Long-term research platform in Karnal, India, by H.S. Jat, Principal Scientist at ICAR-CSSRI. (Photo: ICAR-CSSRI and CIMMYT)
Incentives against subsidies
With increasing water shortages worldwide, making the most out of every drop becomes an urgent priority. But in countries where irrigation systems are highly subsidized, farmers may struggle to see this urgency. India, for instance, subsidizes the cost of energy to pump water for farming, thus encouraging smallholders to extract more than they need.
How do we incentivize farmers in these countries to embrace water-efficient technologies?
According to Jat, using the “scientific card” can work with smallholders who, after having farmed for decades, may not change their minds automatically. “These people may be reluctant to accept incentives for water-efficient mechanisms at first, but they will surely be interested in more scientific approaches,” Jat explained, stressing that “the emphasis must be on the science, not on the technology.”
Designing profitable business models can also incentivize producers to embrace more efficient mechanisms. Farmers who have enjoyed irrigation subsidies for decades may not see any profit in trying out new technologies — but what if they are given the chance to become champions or ambassadors of these agricultural innovations? “That brings in a whole new perspective,” Jat said.
Apart from incentivizing farmers, good business models can also draw the attention of large companies, which would bring investment to boost research and innovation in drip irrigation. “More and more businesses are getting interested in smart agriculture and low emission farming, and their inputs can help conceptualize the future of this field,” he observed.
Tesfaye Shiferaw Sida is a multi-disciplinary researcher, educator and R&D practitioner emphasizing on production ecology and resource conservation. He currently holds a Scientist position at International Maize & Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). He organizes and runs projects that facilitate the delivery of agronomy-at-scale solutions, create links among institutions in digital decision support systems, assist implementation of next generation agronomy at scale innovations and nurture internal efficiencies for demand-driven R&D in agronomy.
He is passionate for data-driven decisions, hence proficient in advanced data analytics and programing tools including Python, R, ArcGIS, and more. He is experienced with dynamic systems modeling tools such APSIM, FARMSIM, STELLA and SMILE. He aspires to link hands-on, on-farm and practical experiences to the emerging big data and digital capabilities to assist smallholder farmers benefit from the ‘digital revolution’.
Jannatul Ferdous Asha is a Machinery Development Officer working with CIMMYT’s Sustainable Agrifood Systems (SAS) program in Bangladesh. She joined CIMMYT in 2019.
Asha completed an undergraduate degree in agricultural engineering and a masters degree in farm power and machinery at Bangladesh Agricultural University.
With ten years of experience as a crop scientist, Vimbayi Grace Petrova Chimonyo’s research focuses on integrated crop management to address food and nutrition security issues, climate change and rural development. She works primarily with crop simulation modelling as a tool for adapting to climate change and variability and improving food security, especially for smallholder farmers.
She has a good understanding of resource use (water, soil nutrients and solar radiation) within the agricultural sector, Water-Food-Nutrition-Health nexus, the Water-Energy-Food nexus within food system landscapes, and the need for transformative strategies for inclusive food security.
Her main research interests are developing resilient cropping systems with an emphasis on sustainable intensification under climate variability and change.
