Improving irrigation management to increase the productivity and livelihoods of smallholder banana growers in the post-conflict region of Magdalena, Colombia

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Improving the agricultural productivity and livelihoods for banana producers in the Magdalena Department (region) ofColombia is a national economic priority. Through implementation of a suite of innovative remote and ground basedenvironmental data collection techniques to increase the efficacy of existing management approaches, coupled withintroduction of novel management options for smallholders and producer organisations, this project constitutes a late-stagecase study to demonstrate the agronomic and socio-economic benefits of using novel EO observation and weather stationsampling methodologies to improve the financial returns for the Colombian banana association ASBAMA, and exporterTecbaco. Specifically, this project will seek to improve the cost-benefit of existing irrigation scheduling advice provided toproducers by Tecbaco, with a view to improving and extending this advice at low cost to smallholder and female bananaproducers who belong to the ASBAMA network. The project will also provide prospecting support to Tecbaco to help thebusiness evaluate the technical feasibility for establishing new production sites in the Santa Marta region to increase exportrevenues from bananas and other high-value agricultural produce. These are intended to represent two exemplars of howgreater and smarter access to low-cost environmental data can be beneficially used by businesses to increase profits foragricultural producers in low income nations, and areas exposed to instability through recent conflict. This projectspecifically focuses on the Colombian banana export market, however, the technologies being implemented could bereadily extended and commercially applied to other regions and crops in the future.