Farmers in Homa Bay are a happy lot after the County Government, in partnership with the TomorrowNow Organisation, launched a climate information centre to aid farming activities.
The system will collect and analyse climate data, including temperature, rainfall, wind, soil moisture, lake conditions, and extreme weather conditions.
It will then disseminate this information to farmers, fishermen, and the locals to assist them in decision-making.
The Country Manager, TomorrowNow, Mr. Ronald Ndiang’a, said the organisation wanted to empower farmers to make decisions through various agro-weather insights.
TomorrowNow is a climate-tech non-profit organisation providing next-generation weather intelligence and crop insights.
“We partnered with Homa Bay to provide these general weather forecasting and digital climate advisories, which this particular centre will be disseminating to different farmers,” he said.
Farmers will now receive information about climate alerts through phone messages and voice notes, as well as on smartphones, through a platform named Homa Bay Agricultural Observatory Climate.
He noted that the centre will help farmers grow in the wake of climate change.
“This centre is basically supporting them to be at the first lane to be able to adapt to this changing climate as they will be able to uptake the new ways of farming like regenerative or climate-smart agriculture,” he stated.
Governor Gladys Wanga, who spoke on Monday after the launch, also echoed these sentiments, reiterating that the information centre will provide information based on the farmers’ location.
“We recently registered a total of 245,000 farmers, and we know the location of their farms and what they are growing, whether cotton or soya. We basically know their geolocation,” she said, adding that the system will provide farmers with advisory services and climate alerts.
“Our ancestors would look at the sky and tell whether it would rain or not, but because of climate change, it’s impossible to tell, and that is why we are now taking advantage of technology to advise our farmers accordingly,” Wanga said.
By Sitna Omar
