Online Resources for Uruguayan Agriculture

One of IRI's goals for its work in South America is to bring state-of-the-art climate information into the hands of people and groups who can make immediate use of it. In Uruguay, the IRI has teamed up with the country's agriculture research institute to develop a comprehensive online resource for farmers, farming cooperatives and policy makers to help them gauge climate risks and make decisions on where, when and how to grow crops.

The resource, called an Information and Decision Support System, gives users relevant information on expected crop yields, pasture production, current climate conditions, climate forecasts and areas at risk for drought and pests. Users can access the IDSS from the web pages of the Uruguay's Instituto National de Investigacion Agropecuaria (INIA).

"The IDSS brings together results from many disciplines and presents them in a format that is easy to use and understand," says Walter Baethgen, who directs IRI's Latin America and the Caribbean Regional Program. "We developed it in order to overcome certain obstacles to the flow of information," he says.

One obstacle was an inability of nontechnical people to understand certain types of information. "Crop simulation models are a perfect example of this," says Baethgen. "These have been around for decades, but farmers and policy makers generally don't have the technical skills to run them or even understand their outputs, and they're the ones who can actually act on the information provided by the models."

Crop models simulate how plants behave under a set of environmental conditions--for example, how they use energy from the sun, take up water from the soil and transition from one growth stage to another.

"The beauty of some models is that they not only allow us to study the impacts of rain and temperature on crop yields, but also the impacts of technological interventions such as using fertilizers, growing different cultivars and changing planting dates," says Baethgen. All this information is crucial for making decisions in the agriculture sector, he says.

The second obstacle was a lack of communication of relevant and potentially useful research. "In the developing world especially, there's a lot of valuable work that isn't published," says Baethgen. "So it ends up staying in desk drawers and filing cabinets, when it could be put to good use."

Instead of trying to bring complicated technology and training to all possible end users, IRI and INIA have chosen to do something far simpler and more effective: they're doing the hard work by running the crop simulation models for each type of crop, using hundreds of possible combinations of environmental conditions. They publish the results online, in the form of easy-to-understand maps, charts and bulletins. INIA estimates the system draws approximately 400,000 web hits annually from a variety of users.

"For example, an agronomist advising a farming cooperative can use the IDSS to find out what would happen if farmers planted a certain type of corn in a certain type of soil during an El Ni–o year and compare that to planting a different type of corn under the same conditions," Baethgen says, "all without having to know anything about how to run a model."

Policy makers can use the IDSS as well. "Let's say they want to use insurance programs or credit programs in rural areas to stimulate sustainable practices, such as growing wheat only in those areas best suited for the crop. Using the IDSS, they can view maps which show precisely that," he says. Rural credit providers can use this kind of information to help estimate the cost of insurance, charging higher premiums to farmers who want to grow crops not ideally suited to their locale.

The IRI is also exporting the successful IDSS model to neighboring Paraguay and Chile.

"But it's our Uruguayan colleagues who are using their experience to now teach their counterparts in Paraguay," says Baethgen. "IRI is a relatively small institute. Since we can't directly train thousands of people, our approach is to 'train the future trainers'. We organize our educational activities with the hope that some of the students go back to instruct others in their own countries and regions. And in this respect, the IRI is helping to stimulate south-south cooperation."

Relevant Links
IRI's IDSS page

About the IRI
The IRI works on the development and implementation of strategies to manage climate related risks and opportunities. Building on a multidisciplinary core of expertise, IRI partners with research institutions and local stakeholders to best understand needs, risks and possibilities. The IRI supports sustainable development by bringing the best science to bear on managing climate risks in sectors such as agriculture, food security, water resources, and health. By providing practical advancements that enable better management of climate related risks and opportunities in the present, we are creating solutions that will increase adaptability to long term climate change. IRI is a member of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.