From Rain4Africa project to AgriCloud service

Published on 3 June 2019 by Saskia van Pelt

At the 31st of May, Weather Impact successfully ended the Rain4Africa project. Together with 8 partners more than 125.000 small scale South African farmers were targeted with the best available weather and climate services, to increase their food production and reduce weather and climate related risks. After 4 years of project, Rain4Africa has now resulted in an operational service called “AgriCloud”. 

“After receiving advice from AgriCloud, I can see now my farm has become better.”

Mr. M.P. Tlamama, farmer

AgriCloud is an online weather based agricultural advisory system that supports farmers and agribusinesses in their day-to-day work to make weather-optimized decisions. Via workshops it has reached over 300.000 farmers in the past years and has an even larger scaling potential.

The AgriCloud platform provides its information to the outside world via three different channels:

  1. A mobile app that extension officers can use to register their farmers and provide them real-time advisories exactly for their farm location. People who do not have a smartphone, can make use of a USSD service.
  2. Online dashboards for agribusinesses, to monitor the progress and business risks of the current season.
  3. Application services (API) to connect this information to other platforms and stakeholders.

The AgriCloud service will continue operations in South Africa after lifetime of the Rain4Africa project. A strong partnership of public and private partners forms the basis of this service. Among these partners are the South African Weather Services, provider of the best available climate and weather data of South Africa, the Agricultural Research Council, provider of agronomic knowledge, HydroNET, a Dutch platform owned by HydroLogic, and Weather Impact, developer of mobile agri-weather applications.

AgriCloud mobile app is available for free in the Google Play Store. In this way even small-scale farmers have access to this information for free. The data (API) and platform services are paid services which sustain the support to small scale farmers. Are you interested to learn more about the AgriCloud platform service, or would you like to connect to our API? Please reach out to us.