The Hindu Business Line : Study exhorts forecasters to explain weather onsite for better farm yields

WEATHER forecasters would do well to back up generated data with opportunities for farmers, especially in regions strongly influenced by large global climate variations such as those caused by El Nino and La Nina, to meet together and ask questions about the forecasts.

It's not enough just to let the farmers know that it will be a dry or wet growing season, according to research conducted by a Boston University team in sub-Saharan Zimbabwe.

The team's model, coupling radio-delivered seasonal climate forecasts with participatory workshops for subsistence farmers, is the first to show that communication with farmers at grassroots level helps them better understand and apply forecast information to their farming decisions. And better decisions on what to plant and when to plant and harvest means better yields, even in difficult years.

The team's research is reported in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US.

The findings show that the farmers made good decisions in response to good information, the report said, interpreting data on improved crop yields for farmers who participated in a series of workshops.

The communication system allowed farmers to take maximum advantage of forecast information being presented in radio broadcasts.

The data showing better decision making and better crop yields also can help support decisions by developing nations on whether to incur the additional expense that an annual workshops programme would demand. When launching its study, the team sought answers to two questions:

1 Do farmers who use forecast information to make decisions that change their usual approach to farming actually benefit from having done so?

2 Are subsistence farmers with access to a sustained participatory communications process more likely to use the information than farmers who hear about the forecasts through less interactive channels, such as radio reports alone?

For the study, the team selected four villages in Zimbabwe, both because the villages represented a cross-section of growing conditions for this sub-Saharan Africa nation and because Zimbabwe's climate is strongly influenced by the El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle.

Research has shown that climate variations caused by the ENSO cycle can explain more than 60 per cent of the variance in maize yields for farmers in that country.

Farmers in each village had access to seasonal weather forecasts that were developed by the Southern African Regional Climate Outlook Forum and repackaged and disseminated by radio by the Zimbabwe Department of Meteorological Services.

The forecasts contained rainfall probabilities for early (October-December) and late (January-March) parts of the growing season.

To augment the information received in the radio weather broadcasts, the team held a series of annual participatory workshops in each village.

At the workshops, the farmers heard explanations of the rainfall forecasts and were able to ask questions of the agricultural service officers attending the sessions.

After four years of workshops, the team surveyed participants and non-participants in each village about farming decisions, crop yields, and other demographic factors.

When the researchers compared crop yields for the two groups of respondents, they found that even in "bad" growing years, farmers who had participated in workshops reported better crop yields than did farmers who had not.

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