Climate Smart Agriculture Digital Technologies for Increased and Sustainable Agricultural Production in Sudan

Increasing production per unit area or expanding the existing agricultural land are important to meet the food demand of the rapidly growing population. To address the challenge, digital agricultural technologies have been used to increase access to agricultural information such as weather forecasts, provide agricultural extension services and reduce the cost of project implementation as well as shorten the time-of-service delivery. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the available and easily accessible CSA digital technologies that contribute to at least two pillars of Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) of increased food productivity and adaptation. Yield prediction was based on NASA's multi-temporal MODIS images with limited ground information, while for ICT was based on selected farmers fields' corners using GPS and linked with farmers' mobile phone. For the digital farm machinery, two major irrigation technology toolkits were deployed among farmers. The land preparation was conducted using laser guided Engineered land levelling. Results showed that satellite-based measurements can be used to predict crop yield (e.g., sorghum yield was predicted 30 days before harvesting). Results also indicated that ICT are effectively improve crop production (increase in wheat yield was range between 40 and 80%). The interviewers showed that ICT shorter irrigation interval and increased yield of wheat through SMS messages. On the other hand, the results of the digital farm machinery (e.g., laser land leveling) ensured that wheat yield and water productivity can be increased up to 5.0 t/ha and 1.28 kg/m3, respectively over the wheat national average yield of 1.7 t/ha.