An agricultural atlas for Vietnam

Many projects I am currently working on, have a study site in Vietnam. Having detailed geographical data therefore becomes crucial. I just got access to the data to the agricultural atlas of Vietnam produced by my supervisor.

Find whole atlas and the pdf of each map here.

If you need the data, don't hesitate to contact me!

Setting new frontiers in Earth monitoring : or how new satellites are going to change our lifes

This morning i was discussing small scale study area maps with a colleague of mine. Very soon the discussion drifted to high resolution images. He draw my attention to this New York times article about a start-up that is about to launch low cost satellites, to collect new images of Earth.

Unlike the satellite that we use today, it will be possible to have an image of every location on earth every day, allowing to monitor earth on a daily base.  In addition, the satellite will fly on lower elevation than the current satellites, so give us more detailed images.

Why is this so cool?
Yes i can do more accurate maps of my study sites, but I wonder if anyone is really waiting for them. But the big revolution is that this technology allows to count trees or check how rivers are changing on a daily base. It means that one can monitor for example deforestation in the Amazon daily and intervene faster if there is illegal logging takes place, or monitor floods and plan rescue in a more efficient way, or support precision agriculture in the developed world... And God knows, maybe we would have found the missing Malaysian aircraft faster?

In any case i am looking forward to see this new product on market hoping that it will be easily accessible for science in the developing world, so that we can operationalize the content of these images for the poor.

Icow : how the kenyan mobile revolution also contributes to agricultural developement

M-pesa, the mobile payment system invented by Safaricom already years ago, allows to send money by mobile phone. It has revolutionized how people make transfers, in particular for women with micro credits. With m-pesa, they can directly reimburse their credit as they earn money, they don't need to keep it in the house until the payment day and in this way they avoid that their husbands use the money for something else (drinking)...




The developed world, that did not know about this technologies until recently, is now realizing that Africa has developed its own solutions and every day is pushing them further, as the above extract from the Swiss news shows.
The latest Kenyan mobile phone innovation is icow, a system that sends you weekly tricks and tips about dairy farming. It also allows you to register your cow and get personalized information such as reminder about which cow needs to vaccinates. Finally it also allows you to get the phone number of your nearest vet.

A pretty cool mobile phone solution that does not even need a smartphone... maybe one could use this information for crowd sourcing? 

Get the crowd to save the world! and a reflection on crowd-sourcing in the developing world

I recently discovered that one of my task in my job was to get the geo-wiki for livestock working. A geo-wiki is a platform that allows crowd-sourcing your map. Crowd-sourcing? It means asking people out there to validate your map.
To validate the global land use map, Steffen from IIASA and his team have developed a game, named cropland capture, that shows satellite images and photos to the player who must decide if he sees cropland or not. Land-use maps are usually based on satellite images and use an algorithm to decide what the land use is. So there is always a pretty high chance of an error. Verifying a global land use map is mission impossible for one person, but if the whole world contribute we might get a pretty accurate map quite fast! The game has been a big success, a big parts of the world could be validated.



I had my big doubt about how crowd sourcing could be an option for the developing world. Most of the areas i worked it in Ethiopia had no mobile phone network, so no internet, no electricity so no option to recharge a phone, and a smartphone was an item for the fancy high society. However Kenya is different, it is the place where m-pesa, payment via sms has been invented (a functionality that is yet to be implemented for the Swiss mobile phone networks). Many people have mobile phone coverage, and Safari.com the leading local telecom provider is providing the already very famous (at least for those who know me) Huawei smart phone that gives you the whole android functionality for about 60 usd. So the problem of crowd-sourcing in Kenya is not a technological one, but a motivational one : how can we convince farmers to log on an app and pay for the internet connection in order to report to us about their number of cows, the way the hold them or how they manage manure? The idea is to offer something to the farmers for free for which they usually have to pay for, for example the weather forecast. A farmer can consult the official weather forecast for free if he reports to us about some of this farm practices. An idea that we are going to test in Kenya this year. Not later this week end, i was introduced to the techie community in Nairobi, the young freaks setting new frontiers of how new technologies can improve the lives in the developing worlds... a crowd we definitely will want to involve into the project.

Also the team is working on a phone app which geo-references your landscape pictures from your fields or trips. These pictures are then used in the game to validate the land-use map and give us a better picture of what is really happening on the ground.

This is definitely an amazingly fascinating part of my job which will take some time until it is fully set up! In the meantime wanna help us to save the world and validate maps? play crop capture here!

Fishing on Mount Kenya?

Recently, I joined a trip with some friends of mine to Mount Kenya. Yes, you know that's the place where people go to see elephants. But I usually do things a bit differently, so i went to see fish.

Some years ago, the Kenyan government has acknowledged that it is impossible to control protected forest areas, such as in Mount Kenya. Instead of having lots of policemen facing the mission impossible to make sure that no tree is cut, the Kenyan government rent out licenses to use the forest to communities, when the use is sustainable and does not threaten the natural resources base of the forest. In this way, the communities "own the forest" if there is illegal use, they will report to the authority. It is a quite smart way to manage forests in a developing country...

The first trout fish community, the ponds are covered to avoid that birds "go easy fishing"

Trout fish farming is such an non-competing use of the forest. Trout fish can be farmed in ponds that are colder than 18 degrees in which there is always running fresh water. Hence river water from Mount Kenya can be diverted through the ponds before joining the river again. In this manner there is no impact on this downstream communities.

A pond for growing trout fish, it has always running water, otherwise the fish dies

We visited two communities. The first has a fully functioning closed system that allows to produce the whole cycle from the fish fingerling to the trout fish for the market. This community even is testing an asexual breed, which is produced by a research center and which should grow faster than the normal fish.

This video shows a demonstration how to catch the "parent fish" and extract the eggs. The egg extraction needs a lot of experience, as a fish can only be out of water for less than 1 minutes and 30  seconds. These eggs are then kept indoor, in a small basin until they become fish fingerling. From there, they are kept in small wooden boxes that have running water, until they are big enough to survive in a small pond. From the small pond they will be moved to the big pond. A trout fish needs 10 months to come to maturity. A parent fish can produce eggs for about 2 -3 years before it needs to be replaced.

The extracted fish eggs

The fish fingerling, kept inside

Basin for fingerlings before they are big enough for the big ponds

This community also produces it own fish food with fish leftover, soy flour they buy on the market and other farm residues.

The machine to make fish food

The second community we visited, just has three functioning ponds, but run out of capital to construct other ponds, or the infrastructure to produce their food or the fish fingerling. The community of 25 farmers from the surrounding villages got the licence for the forest, and produce little fish but they have big plans. Next to a complete infrastructure, they also want to create an eco-lodge where people can enjoy the forest and come fishing. As trout fish has a huge potential and there is a market deficit, this is a promising project. 

The ponds of the second community, can yield at 6000 marketable fishes

Any idea where this community could get funds to develop further? then let me know!

The community members presenting their projects

How pinapple business can lift up a whole region.

Africa is potentially one of the most promising market for the up-coming years. Swiss TV visited Swiss people working in Africa and benefiting from these emerging market. Find here the overview of the whole TV program.

One Swiss, lives in Ghana and produces pineapple. It shows the challenges of producing fruits for the international markets, but also how innovative creative ideas can be implemented. A biogas plant using the residue of the pineapples to get the energy for his drying plant.



Usually when investor come, local smallholders loose their market, and do not really benefit from the trade and export market. In Ghana this is different.  Maik Blaser, who operates the company contracts local farmers to produce for him : he gives out the pineapple plants and guarantees buying the produce for at a price that is fixed in advance (future contracts). In this way, smallholders can benefit the export market, make money and send their kids to school.

Finally, the plant is hiring many people offering decent wages outside of the primary sector...

Working in Africa is definitely not easy, but creative solution can really make a change... this is just another good example that no NGO is needed to support Africa...

Wanna be a pioneer of a new more equal North-South relationship?

How many of us living in the Western world wake up every morning, are frustrated from seining an unequal world, a huge gap between the North and the global South. Yet, there is so little one can do. Traveling to developing countries often brings you in a badly organized and expensive tourist track, that enables a few to get rich and all other remain poor. You enter into a closed world, where you see lots of monuments, you hardly meet locals except for the kids who run behind you to beg you for money or a pen. The only local you meet is the tour guide, who is one of the winner of the system and just ensures that you only see what the country wants to show. You come home with the bitter feeling that you did not visit that country. Your second option is to volunteer, but face it you cannot change the world by visiting a country for 2-3 weeks, and even worse you might actually take away a local job. Do you really want to do this? The third option is to make donations, but by now we all know, most of the money stays in the developed world to pay wages and nice offices. Aid has made poverty a business like baking and selling bread. People have to remain poor so that the aid industry to which you donate money can persist. Do you really want to support this?

The community lodge

Powerlessness we all face is source of a lot of frustrations, and only few of us wake up one morning and say, yes we can contribute to a new way to look at North-South relationships and invent new approaches that are more respectful of local traditions, and consider each human to be equally important and capable of taking decision about one own life. You might think, this is too difficult for me, I am just too small to change anything. If you think like this you are simply wrong, there are today easy options to be part of a different world.

Inside travel has the right solution for you : book a social tourism trip to Ethiopia. You go on a semi-organized tour, which makes sure that you are going to meet local people on the street, you live a normal day with a middle class family, you visit and try out handcraft in local NGOs, and finally you spend some days with a rural community, who is going to introduce you in its daily activities. You can learn how women are organized to help each others, the fears and dreams of the local kids, and when you come home, you know how to wave an Ethiopian traditional basket and make traditional coffee.

Interact with local people

And now you think, why am i a pioneer if i just go on a fun holiday? Inside travel is run by volunteers who insure that the money you pay is spread in equitable way in Ethiopia, we pay local (low but market conform wages) to people involved with us, whereas the margin on our trips is spread in the communities with work with, making sure that not one person but a whole community can benefit from tourism. For example, farmers involved with tourists will get a local wage, the difference with the price that the tourist pays, goes to a communal bank account. The community has clear rule how to administer that money and they decide as a community how they want to invest it. In this way the community has the power and the ownership of their projects (no NGO with strange donation rule tells them what to do). Basically, by visiting this community, you offer them the opportunity to work and raise money in dignity, they don't beg, they don't feel indebted, they get paid for services.The particular community we work with has decided to fund their own clinic with the money from tourism.

discovering everyday life

So you still believe that a different world in unreachable? Could i convince you that it might be easier than what you think? Wanna be a pioneer of this new North-South relationship? Then join our Easter tip from 10th to 21st of April 2014 ! check it out on www.insidetravel.ch

Join us for your next adventure

Save the cock!

In the Western world, meat production has become a real industry. Particularly chocking is the chicken production : half of the chicks are males, they don't give eggs and don't grow fast enough to give meat. So comes that half of the chicks, namely the male one are killed on the first day of live. Somehow, this is just such a waste.

A new breed is now being tested in Switzerland, for which the female are kept for eggs and the male fatten fast enough to become meat. So no first day killing anymore. However, this breed is less productive than the today's one.

Have a look at the report from the Swiss TV report about this new breed.

Is it the end of the quail dream?

Some time ago I had reported from a friend of mine who is breeding quails in the suburbs of Nairobi. At that time it was a tremendously good business. At that time, she was breeding the birds for resale to farmers who wanted to have quails, an alternative to chicken farming with low barrier to entry and low risk for diseases. In the meantime, the market has saturated, quails eggs can be found in the majors supermarket in Nairobi, at a pretty high prices (around 4 dollar 12 eggs, while 6 chicken eggs are less than a dollar), and prices both of one day old chicks and eggs start decreasing.

Prices from the old time

Because she has discovered that many people just come to learn from her farm, and that this is taking a lot of time, she decided to charge for a visit. Also a way to diversify income.

Young quails waiting for a buyer

For the first time since she is raising quails, she has animals that she has not sold in advance, suggesting that market has reached its saturation, and she has to lower prices to get a market for her birds.

Now, it is about staying in market and to find the profitable value chains for quail products. But given that she has been one of the first to be in market, I am convinced she will make it.

An hommage to Marthijn Sonneveld

When you write a PhD in the Netherlands, you not only get a supervisor, a well known professor who mostly has not time for you, but also two or three daily supervisors, younger scientists who are assistant professors. The great thing of this approach is that you get to work closely with people who have time for you. It does not come as a surprise that these people really influence your vision of the world and science.

At my PhD defense : Marthijn, Jan Huigen (the farmer who initiated my research project), me and Roel

Marthijn Sonneveld was one of my daily supervisor, next to Jetse Stoorvogel and Roel Jongeneel. He was probably the most silent one of all the three, nonetheless his understanding of soils and how they influence the landscape dynamics had a deep impact on my PhD. Not only he had great knowledge about Dutch soils, it formation and use, but he was passionate about teaching. He was not afraid to stand in the field and dig deep wholes to show concretely what he is talking about. Like no one else he was capable of explaining relationships of soils with the landscape as a whole in a easily understandable and yet fascinating way. I guess Marthijn taught me to appreciate and feel home in the openness of Dutch landscapes.

During on of the excursion with students in Friesland

Also Marthijn had a great network of stakeholders through out the whole of the Netherlands. He was one of the few scientists in my surroundings, who truly tied contact with Dutch non scientific partners to make science work for people out there in the landscape. I got a lot from his vision about involving a broad number of stakeholders to answer societal questions, something I try to keep doing in my daily work at ILRI.

Marthijn passed away before the end of the year 2013 after a short fight against cancer, leaving behind a young family. It left me, like many of my colleague speechless in front of powerlessness that we faced and filled me with a deep sorrow. I am glad and privileged that i got the chance to work with him and learn from him. He might have left us, but his ideas and visions will remain and evolve through us, students and colleagues who had the chance to interact and learn from him.

May his family and close friends get a lot of strength to overcome this difficult time and may he rest in peace.

The openness of Dutch landscapes