Cotton Made in Africa Launches Satellite Surveillance
Cotton Made in Africa (CmiA) has launched a program in Tanzania to monitor cotton fields using satellite-supported remote sensing. It follows India, which launched a similar program in the spring.
With partner Geoclidian Gmbh providing the technology, the sensing catalogues growth, location and soil quality to help get farmers on an efficient planting schedule in order to maximize yield. A third partner is Alliance Ginneries Ltd. of Tanzania.
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The system uses GPS data which locates and identifies the cotton fields, with the data analyzed field by field. The system then uses machine learning in tandem with computer algorithms to create a time series for the surveyed fields.
The data is sourced from the observation satellites of the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 Earth observation mission. It provides optical imagery at high spatial resolution that essentially maps the highs and lows of each cotton field.
The data also provides the cotton plants’ phenological status, a record of where they are in their growth phase, i.e. between seed sowing and lint harvesting. This allows observers to identify anomalies in enough time to put the crop on a correction course and improve the harvest for the next season. This also helps farmers comply with CmiA sustainability criteria and will aid in compliance with new traceability legislation on the horizon.
According to Tina Stridde, managing director of the Hamburg-based Aid by Trade Foundation, the remote sensing project will be critical to crop health particularly in the face of climate change that all farmers, not just smallholders, are confronting on the African continent as well as in India and Pakistan.
“Future-proofing is crucial, as is being prepared to take advantage of any technological opportunities that arise to help support the smallholder farmers,” she said. “The CmiA standards’ work in the coming years will focus on making major progress in advancing the cotton sector in Africa South of the Sahara and in making it more sustainable through sensible and feasible innovations.”
India’s satellite program got off the ground earlier this year in response to charges of fraud surrounding cotton grown in India that was described as organic, prompting new efforts to deter deceptive cotton claims. That initiative was spearheaded by the Global Organic Textiles Standard (GOTS), the European Space Agency and the German data fusion agency Marple.
CmiA, part of the Hamburg-based Aid by Trade Foundation, is internationally known for its standards for sustainably produced cotton from Africa. It also links African smallholders with trading companies and fashion brands throughout the entire global textile value chain. Some 900,000 farmers profit from its efforts to improve their living and working conditions.
