The Ghanaian cashew sector is expected to witness a massive boost to the tune of about $102.21 million through the intervention of artificial intelligence tailored toward precision farming of the crop.
The project lead and CEO of KaraAgro AI, Darlington Akogo, noted that the company is engaged by GIZ to develop and provide precision agriculture solutions that help farmers to improve crop yields and on-farm productivity.
With the Artificial Intelligence-powered solutions, they will provide crop monitoring, health assessment, early warning systems, early plant disease, and pest detection, and canopy cover assessment for cashew farmers in order to curb losses.
KaraAgro AI won the contract to implement the activity “leveraging machine learning for the Ghanaian cashew sector based on drone and satellite imagery data” for FAIR Forward.
On behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) implements the project “FAIR Forward – Artificial Intelligence for All” strives for a more open, inclusive, and sustainable approach to AI on the international level. To achieve this, FAIR Forward is working together with partners in Ghana, Rwanda, South Africa, Uganda, India, Kenya and Indonesia. FAIR Forward pursues three goals, which are to strengthen local technical know-how on AI; remove entry barriers to AI by improving access to training data and AI technologies for local innovation, and develop policy frameworks ready for AI.”
Ghana produces around 110,000 to 130,000 tonnes of raw cashew nuts. Of this, about 85% is exported to Vietnam and India for further processing.
According to Ghana Export Promotion Authority (GEPA), Raw Cashew Nuts (RCN) is the leading non-traditional export earner after processed cocoa. With a fluctuating yet lucrative value export, Ghana exported about US$340.7 million of Raw Cashew Nuts across the globe in 2020.
Ghana’s exports of Raw Cashew Nuts represent more than half (58.34%) of all Raw Cashew Nuts exported to the world in 2020.
The agricultural sector in Ghana remains the pillar of the country’s economy, but one of the major production risks happens to be pests and diseases.
Climate change, which is an uncontrolled factor, causes a shift in the occurrence of pests and diseases, increasing the potential for new and more damaging types of outbreaks. Pests and diseases pose a constant threat.
In 2019, the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA) procured 79,560 litres and 20,662kg of strategic stock of insecticides for the control of fall army worms.
A total of 140,000ha of farmland was sprayed and recovered. This intervention saved 434,000mt of crop output, valued at GH₵694.4million, from being destroyed. In 2020, the ministry procured 120,494 litres and 90,500 kg of insecticides to control the menace.
In order to identify the key challenges facing cashew farming in Ghana, KaraAgro AI together with GIZ conducted extensive user research through stakeholder engagements. These engagements involved key stakeholders and potential beneficiaries of the activity across public, research, private, agriculture, and technology sectors.
The first engagement involved representatives from the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA), Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana (CRIG), medium to large-scale cashew farmers, and cashew processing companies like African Cashew Alliance (ACA), Red River Foods, Volta Cashew Limited and Association of Cashew Processors Ghana (ACPG).
Darlington Akogo gave a presentation to the stakeholders on the “Use of AI in Agriculture, which helped the stakeholders to understand how AI solutions work.
Upon further discussions, it was determined that the main concerns of the key Ghanaian cashew stakeholders within the Ghanaian cashew farm are pest and disease detection and yield estimation. Other concerns that came up included using AI for data collection (i.e. farm sizes and coordinates, number of farmers, etc), and determining the right farming practices, among others.
During the second stakeholder engagement which was held at Offuman in Techiman North district with an association of small-scale cashew farmers, mostly females called Medimafo Tease Association, it was identified that the key challenge they also faced are pests and disease infestation with the major pests being helopeltis and anoplocnemis.
To address this issue, KaraAgro AI is developing an AI4Cashew platform that will allow for the processing of drone-captured images of cashew fields and the automated early detection of helopeltis and anoplocnemis.
The system is a cross-platform solution.
It will be used by agricultural extension officers who visit cashew fields across the country.
The AI4Cashew platform will empower them to help more cashew farmers rapidly identify pests on their fields and then respond to them, therefore increasing on-farm productivity and their yields.
This connects greatly with the current activities of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA) which is creating E-Agricultural Centres across the country, which are planned on equipped with drones, among other devices.
This will allow agricultural extension officers to use the drones in combination with the AI4Cashew platform.
With farmers currently losing an average of 30% in crop yield due to diseases and pests, this project has the potential of helping the Ghanaian cashew sector increase its annual export by an estimated US$ 102.21 million.
