The Prefecture of Meknès is located in north-east Morocco and registered in 2020 with a population of 554,000 people.
The crops with the most important agricultural production in Morocco are wheat (almost 48% of farmers produce it), olive (47% of farmers), onion (35%), and potato (almost 19%).
FoodLAND surveyed a total amount of 500 farmers in this region with the aim of improving the background knowledge of African smallholder farmers’ decision-making and individual and contextual conditions. 71 out of these 500 farmers surveyed were women; all the rest were men. 77% of farmers are not members of any local farmers’ associations.
According to the information gathered from the surveys, 71.4% of farmers’ income is lower than the average income in the region, the income of 25% of farmers is about the average or somewhat higher, and only 3.6% of farmers stated an income higher than average. Nevertheless, 70,8% of them can meet their household’s food needs, 22.4% experience some difficulties, and 6.8% face serious food shortages.
Besides, they have reported major worries regarding the near future about the cost price increase of fertilizer or seed (3.82 on a scale from 1 to 5), drought (3.35) and income reduction and health diseases (3.05 and 3 respectively).
With regard to their interest and propensity to introduce new technologies and/or productions, 77% of farmers are extremely or moderately interested in adopting a technological innovation (4.24 on a scale from 1 to 5).
Technological innovations in this Food Hub
Precision irrigation systems. The installation of irrigation/ fertigation systems with smart sensors can efficiently prevent such a waste of water. The objective is to set up a digital solution allowing small farmers to schedule irrigation / Fertigation based on the monitoring of the continuous Soil, Plant climate using sensors and a smartphone app. All the information will be gathered through data collected by sensors installed in the field, processed, and distributed by a Big Data service.
In parallel, field trials should be done in order to validate the scientific algorithm incorporated within the app. These trials have the objective also to determine the scheduling irrigation parameters for some specific crops that are dominated in the region: potatoes, onion, and carrots.
Precision protection systems. The main objective of this axis will be to develop an early warning system for the management of late blight (downy mildew), caused by Phytophthora infestans on potato crops, based on the multispectral aerial images taken by drones equipped with multispectral camera sensors. During this study, researchers will focus on the use of multispectral wavebands (red-edge and near-infrared) and spectral vegetation indices (e.g., green/red ratio) as relevant feature predictors of general stress in plants. These vegetation indices will be correlated with disease severity to identify which is the best vegetation index to use for early detection of downy mildew on potato crops.
Smart storage systems. In order to further improve the conservation system already used in an area of Meknes, an intelligent system of humidity and temperature control through the use of connected sensors will be installed inside the silos. Additionally, a mobile application will be developed to monitor humidity and temperature parameters and also make remote decisions for the opening or closing of plastic flaps or the activation of fans.
