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Accurate crop mapping plays a crucial role in providing reliable crop production estimates, addressing climate change, and developing sustainable agriculture strategies. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) has partnered with university students in Tanzania on a pilot project to collect grassroots data on grain, oilseed, and cotton crops. This initiative aims to strengthen community agricultural systems and improve crop condition assessments with the help of satellite imagery.

During the project, 14 YouthMappers spent four days in the Arusha area capturing data on 334 fields. They conducted tasks such as photographing, georeferencing, and identifying target crops to enhance FAS satellite imagery analysis. YouthMappers is an international network of university-based chapters that organize and implement mapping activities to meet global and local development needs.

The collaboration between FAS, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and Tanzanian groups focused on building skills in field work, data sampling, and assessing agricultural conditions. The team’s main objective was to create an agricultural library of ground-truth data from the regions of Arusha, Dodoma, and Mwanza. This project marked the first time that YouthMappers utilized its members’ skills to strengthen agricultural data.

To make this a viable machine learning project, the team focused on locating target crops of FAS’ International Production Assessment Division (IPAD), including corn, sorghum, millet, rice, and cotton. The field work also revealed variability in crop heights, indicating early or late rains, and kept an eye out for pest damage, particularly from the fall armyworm.

Since the project’s inception, the Tanzanian YouthMappers network has collected data from 1,700 fields in the Arusha, Dodoma, and Mwanza regions. This data is now being paired with satellite imagery from Sentinel-2, thanks to YouthMappers’ efforts. This collaboration enhances our understanding of crop conditions and the impact of seasonal rains, enabling us to respond to unusual crop conditions caused by climate change and provide improved information for decision-makers.

Furthermore, in May, the YouthMappers trained additional university students on geo-mapping with ArcGIS, OpenStreetMap, and Kobo Collect. This training is aimed at advancing Tanzanian agriculture and achieving project goals in the Dodoma and Mwanza regions. The project also involved conducting meetings with local community members to learn about agriculture, share information about crop identification technology, and obtain permission for field work.

The Tanzania partnership is part of FAS’ broader efforts to develop young agricultural leaders and strengthen Africa’s self-development and capacity-building. Similar initiatives are underway in Ghana and Uganda. The results of the project will be presented at the upcoming Africa Food Systems Forum, which aims to strengthen African agricultural and food systems through inclusivity, sustainability, resiliency, and equity.

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