Makara: A tool for cotton farmers to evaluate risk to income

Smallholder farmers are critical to global food production and natural resource management. Due to increased competition for water resources and variability in rainfall due to climate change, chronic irrigation water scarcity is rising particularly in drought-prone regions. Improving the awareness of climatic risk to yields and incomes is critical to sustainable agricultural intensification. However, adopting a new technology represents a certain level of risk for the farmers, who invest time and economic resources in changing their practices. We have developed a mobile application, currently for cotton, that would allow farmers to actualize the risk of growing cotton. By implementing a sociohydrological dynamic model with a kernel principal component analysis structural error model, the software provides a risk forecast of the yield and profit the user can expect at the end of the season. The mobile app not only processes social and agricultural information provided by the user but also retrieves and continually updates climate datasets from the web, as well as market prices. The users can request the execution of the sociohydrological model to the servers from their own mobile devices. By following an agile methodology, the mobile app has been tested with ∼100 farmers in order to get feedback from real users; this brought the opportunity to redesign the functionality based on the correct understanding of information and, a fast and clear management of the tool and helping in the adoption of the technology. This was combined with existing knowledge around communicating risk by using multiple modes of communication - text, graphics, sound and video - all of which were implemented to reinforce the knowledge communicated and ensure sufficient redundancy. This turned out to be beneficial for farmers with low prior knowledge and higher acceptability of the mobile app by the users as evidenced through feedback rounds with them. This study exemplifies an approach to address the gap in communicating risks in agriculture using a user-friendly mobile application.