Production : Production Overview

Benin / © Peeter Viisimaa

Production Overview

Here we describe and provide access to data assembled and generated by HarvestChoice that defines our highly dissaggregated perspective on the context, distribution, structure and performance of agricultural production. We focus, initially, on crop-based production systems of one of our primary target beneficiaries, the smallholder farm households of sub-Saharan Africa. There are five core clusters of production-related data.

• The biophysical context within which production systems have evolved and for which many technological interventions are often tailored. These data layers also allow us to explore the linkages between agricultural and other ecosystem services, e.g. water.
• Our (still-evolving) representation of the specific production systems that have evolved within each biophysical domain in response to food demand, market access, and technological opportunities amongst other factors.
• Market data that is almost entirely structured by commodity (production and price, value of production, inputs, trade)
• Many innovations and interventions are targeted to mitigate specific production constraints, both abiotic (e.g., drought and soil quality) and biotic (pests, diseases and weeds)
• Biophysical constraints either alone or in combination with other production threats or uncertainties result in production risk. Here we describe our emerging work on smallholder production risks that seeks to improve the design and effectiveness of planned interventions.

Corn / © Bill Grove

This section concludes with two cross-cutting issues; a specific focus on the tools employed by HarvestChoice and its partners to generate some of the key production data layers described, and second the HarvestChoice initiative on Data Rescue Initiative, responding to an urgent need to ensure that scarce Agricultural Census reports from sub-Saharan Africa are captured and made publicly accessible and, where feasible are used to (re-)generate standard format data tables for analysis purposes.

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