This farmer 'planted blindly' in a changing climate. A weather app came to his rescue

It’s a hot, sunny day in Miu, a rural village in south-central Kenya. And 31-year-old Stephen Nzioka is at home working on his farm of maize, beans and oranges. He whistles as he digs and clears brush.

“I really enjoy working with my hands,” he says through a translator. “It also helps me exercise my body.”

Nzioka comes from a long line of farmers. “Going back generations, they were all involved in farming,” he says. “There was no other option.”

Nzioka began learning to farm when he was 7. His parents would make a small hole and he’d toss a couple of seeds into it. “That’s how they involved me,” he says.

For years, he applied the lessons of his ancestors to his fields. He’d plant in the fall during the rainy season, and he’d harvest a few months later at the start of the dry season. But in the last five or six years, the weather patterns shifted, largely due to a changing climate. Nzioka had no way of knowing when it would rain.

“I [would] plant my produce,” he says, “and then rains don’t come as expected. And so the harvest becomes low, and so that becomes quite difficult since I’ve invested in planting.”

When a farmer like Nzioka has an unsuccessful harvest, it can mean a whole year of lost income.

“I planted blindly and so I kept on guessing and just taking risks,” he says.

Like millions of other farmers across Kenya, Nzioka doesn’t have a smartphone, so he cannot simply look up a five-day forecast. And even if he did have one, the internet connectivity is too spotty in most remote, rural areas to make much difference. But he does have a basic cell phone that makes and receives calls and texts. And more than a year ago, Nzioka’s fortunes changed:

His phone begins to ring. He has just received a message — the kind he now gets weekly.

“It explains that tomorrow there’ll be expected rainfall or sun between this time to this time,” Nzioka says. Based on the forecast, the message also suggests whether to look for potential pests, irrigate or not, fertilize or not. “And so that helps me make a choice on whether to plant or not to plant.”

Weather intelligence

The weather information in these texts originates with a nonprofit called Tomorrow Now. “The way it works is we obtain raw weather data from different sources,” says Kenneth Chepkwony, a regional program coordinator with the group.

That information is a mix of satellite data and weather stations on the ground. It’s also super local — think of the landscape gridded out into squares two-and-a-half miles on a side, each with its own forecast.

This high resolution data helps drive ever more accurate forecasting and weather models, which are provided by the company Tomorrow.io (of which Tomorrow Now is an independent offshoot). This “ensures that farmers can have information that’s relevant to their farm rather than for the entire town,” says Chepkwony.

The data on its own is just information. The goal is to turn it into weather intelligence — something the farmers can actually use to “improve their daily decision-making on the farm,” says Campbell Flatter, the co-founder and executive director of Tomorrow Now. And that’s the job of their governmental partner, the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO).

“We look at the weather information to predict short-term forecast for the farmers,” says Salim Kinyimu, a director at KALRO. “And then we’ll be able to come up with a planting date. We really try to make these messages as simple as possible.”

Down the road, the messages will suggest when to plant, where to grow what crops and which varieties of those crops will fare best. Already, almost five million farmers across Kenya are receiving the weather advisories. On average, Tomorrow Now says they’re seeing a 7% increase in revenues.

The challenges of a changing climate

Farmers across Kenya and beyond are grappling with altered weather and seasons.

“Climate change is hurting our livelihoods, especially considering that agriculture is the backbone of the Kenyan society,” says Chepkwony who grew up west of Nairobi. “It’s threatening entire economic systems.” His father was a farmer until he began losing entire crops due to unpredictable weather. “Quite frankly,” says Chepkwony, “I miss seeing him as a farmer because that was a time when I felt that he was very fulfilled.”

“There is a huge inequity when it comes to weather forecasting globally,” says Campbell Flatter. “There’s about 3 billion people who are essentially blind to localized weather forecasts.”

This is the gap that Tomorrow Now hopes to fill.

“I think they are doing a commendable job, but of course just like with any other technology, there will always be room for improvement,” says Michael Murigi, a Nairobi-based farmer and founder of Focus Wise, a group that promotes drought-tolerant crop varieties and farming practices.

“Disseminating weather forecast messages by themselves may not be very, very useful,” he says, “especially dealing with small farmers who are information poor and in remote villages.” Murigi suggests they might need more support from a local agricultural adviser, say, to help them interpret the text messages they’re receiving and the best way to act on them.

A more dependable future

Stephen Nzioka, the farmer, says his crop yield has improved since he began the program. “So I would say the messages have been quite beneficial,” he says.

That security could make farming a more attractive and dependable option for the millions of people who live in poverty across the country. “Agriculture in Kenya,” says Kinyimu, “is the number one pillar that the government is using as a vehicle to improve food security and eliminate malnutrition.”

Tomorrow Now hopes to reach 100 million small-scale farmers by the end of the decade. They plan to expand their efforts into Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, and elsewhere.

Successful farming can also act as a stepping stone for families and communities to invest in future generations. “If you’re able to grow enough to not just feed your family but to sell on the market,” says Campbell Flatter, “you have money to invest back in your farm, you can rent more land, you can grow more crops and it actually helps the farmers lift themselves out of poverty.”

Nzioka is a good example. He has been able to use a portion of his more dependable income to pay for his daughters’ primary school. “The produce I sell at the market assists them to get to higher levels of education,” he says.

It’s a long term investment in his children’s futures — one made possible by knowing the weather over the next few days.