A flock of migratory birds has repeatedly invaded his parents’ rice plot outside Accra, Ghana’s capital, and the 16-year-old has been tasked with keeping the invaders away from the young crop.

If he fails, there will be no harvest on the one-acre (half-hectare) farm this season.

“This work makes me very tired. I can lose my voice because of shouting at the birds,” said the youth, as he tugged at a rope attached to a bell he was using to scare off the hungry creatures.

“I wish there was a way to make it easier.”

Why it matters: With the help of drones, youth that previously missed school so they can protect the family’s crops can return to their studies

Nearby, farmers and researchers are experimenting with one possible answer: A drone that can help farmers protect their crops from the effects of climate change and ward off hungry birds at the same time.

In a project run by the Netherlands-based Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) rice farmers are being taught how to use drones to carry out jobs such as applying fertilizer more efficiently and mapping scarce water sources, said George Madjitey, CEO of GEM Industrial Solutions.

But there turns out to be a bonus: The drones can emit a noise to keep the birds from undoing all the farmers’ hard work, said Madjitey, whose social enterprise is one of the local firms supplying drones for the project.

The drones cannot operate at all times — but they can help cut down on the need for work like Kenney’s, which can keep young people away from their studies.

While drones have become a staple in farming tool kits in many parts of the world, Ghana’s rice farmers are for the first time learning how the devices can help them adapt to the prolonged droughts the country is experiencing.

With dry spells killing crops and drying natural sources of food across Africa, migratory birds now spend more time feeding on grain fields they come across because they don’t know how long it will be before their next meal, said Kunga Ngece, a Nairobi-based development expert.

According to Madjitey, a single drone can scare away birds on a farm as large as three acres (1.2 hectares).

“The drone makes work easier for farmers because it can operate over a wide range of land. Also, the children are able to stay at home with their families and do their homework instead of being on the farm,” he said.

Complex problems

According to Ghana’s minister of food and agriculture, Owusu Afriyie Akoto, about 80 per cent of the country’s farmers have been impacted by drought this year.

Crop yields have dropped by about seven per cent since a decade ago, and the country loses more than $200 million every year to droughts and flooding, he said in a press conference during the 2019 African Green Revolution Forum held in Accra.

Since the CTA launched its Eyes in the Sky, Smart Techs on the Ground project in Ghana three years ago, starting with cassava and cashew nut farmers, more than 2,800 farmers in rural Ghana have become involved, Madjitey said.

Young innovators

Helping farmers adapt to climate change also presents new business and job opportunities, said Giacomo Rambaldi, head of the drone project at CTA.

Since its launch, Eyes in the Sky has been working with business startups run by young people in more than 20 Africa countries, he said.

The project trains youth in rural areas to operate agribusinesses, such as creating and selling innovations that can improve production for smallholder farmers.

“Some of them are doing really well. They are employing other people and they have quite successful operations,” said Rambaldi.

One reason drone technology has not seen more uptake among African farmers is that many African countries either have no laws regulating the operation of drones or ban their use by civilians, he noted.

In countries like Ghana where drone technology is allowed, however, some farmers are seeing the benefits.

As well as helping them save time and labour, farmers point out that drones cut down on the health risks associated with being in daily contact with chemicals on crops and microbes in muddy fields.

“Drones have taken away all these discomforts,” said Susan Fiebor, a farmer in the village of Asutsuare.

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Before then, Kamuru said, he struggled to sell more than half of the 12 litres of milk his two cows gave during their morning and evening milking sessions.

Selling those six litres earned him about a dollar; the rest of the milk went to his relatives on credit or was drunk by his wife and four children.

Breaking even was hard, he said, with the key problem a lack of refrigerated storage.

Why it matters: Developing countries have long struggled to find proper storage solutions to reduce food waste, encourage production and to provide nutrition in food-short regions. Affordable solar power may provide part of the answer.

“I could spend the whole day at the farm waiting to sell milk to my fellow village customers,” Kamuru told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in Kibumbu village in central Kenya.

And if the morning’s milk supply was difficult to sell — and it was — he was at least able to pasteurize it to ensure it did not go off. The evening’s milk supply was trickier.

“If there were no customers, it all went to waste,” he said.

Others in the Kibumbu Dairy Farmers Association had the same problem, so they approached the governor of Tharaka Nithi County and demanded that he honour a 2012 campaign pledge to construct a milk-cooling plant.

In 2015, the solar-powered facility opened, using county funds.

These days, Kamuru no longer sells milk to the villagers. His family uses two litres a day, while the rest goes to the community-owned plant.

“The amount I deliver is recorded every day, and then I am paid at the end of the month,” he said.

Kenyans often struggle with the country’s unreliable electricity supply, with the problem particularly acute in rural areas.

For the country’s dairy farmers, who, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), have 3.2 million head of dairy cattle, it’s a particular problem.

Kibumbu’s solar milk-cooling plant ensures that farmers like Kamuru can store their milk safely, day or night, without it going off.

The timing is good: demand for dairy products is rising fast, particularly in rapidly growing urban areas, according to the Kenya Livestock Producers Association (KLPA).

“This means that farmers must have access to storage facilities that work around the 24-hour clock without interruption,” said Patrick Kimani, who heads the KLPA.

“Solar-powered milk coolers provide such a solution.”

Typically, local governments pay for milk-cooling plants, then hand over ownership to dairy associations, Tharaka Nithi County Governor Muthomi Njuki said in a phone interview.

It is then the responsibility of the farmers to pay for maintenance, Njuki added. The Tharaka Nithi facility does that by deducting 10 per cent of each farmer’s monthly earnings.

Apart from being community-owned, Kimani said solar milk-cooling plants are cheap to maintain and can deal with the blackouts that continue to trouble Kenya.

The dairy industry is an important part of Kenya’s economy, worth about 3.5 per cent of gross domestic product, the FAO estimates, with about two million people directly or indirectly working in it.

Kimani said the country has about one million dairy farmers, but just 15 per cent can connect to the national electricity grid to refrigerate their milk.

Some of the rest rely on one of 50 solar cooling plants set up in 10 counties since 2014, Kimani said.

With the cost of solar technology falling, he added, building more plants will become increasingly affordable in coming years to help Kenya’s 500-plus dairy associations.

With demand for dairy products climbing, Kimani said, there are plans for plants in key production areas to boost their capacity to process milk into products such as yogurt and milk powder.

At the office of the Kibumbu Dairy Farmers Association, manager Lucy Muthoni divides her day between monitoring the milk containers that farmers bring in and checking that the solar system on the plant’s roof is keeping the coolers humming.

The plant receives more than 5,000 litres of milk a day, she said, with about one-third consumed by people in nearby Chuka town and the rest sent to the capital, Nairobi, for processing.

Solar power and milk make for a good combination, she said.

“Milk is most likely to go bad when the day is hot. Yet it is when it is hot that the solar system can absorb and store more energy to keep the coolers operating during the day and at night,” Muthoni said.

And, she added, the fact that milk can be refrigerated means more local people are turning to dairy farming.

At Munene Njoka’s three-acre farm in Kanjau village in central Kenya, he is cutting his corn crop even though harvest time is three weeks away.

The reason? The five cows in his barn. Njoka chops the corn into pieces then mixes it with dry Napier grass to make silage, a delicacy that he said makes his cows more productive.

Njoka, who learned the technique during a farmers’ field day, has no concerns about feeding his entire corn crop to his cows. Doing so, he said, brings in more money.

“A single cow used to give me about eight litres of milk in a day before I learned about silage,” the father of two said. “Now I can get as much as 20 litres from a single cow.”

That brings in 100,000 Kenyan shillings ($1,000) a month, he said. It beats growing maize to feed his family, he said, because if the rains fail then the crop will wither, leaving him nursing a financial loss and stuck in a cycle of hunger.

“After investing part of the money back to the farm, buying food, paying school fees and health bills, I still have enough to take my family out during weekends,” said Njoka.

That echoes Kamuru’s experience: for him, keeping dairy cows generates more income than growing corn, in part because corn prices are kept low by cheap imports.

“But milk prices are always rising due to demand from a growing urban population. This assures me of a steady income all year round,” he said.

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