AgWise / ABOUT
Scope & benefits
AgWise is a free, modular framework for agronomic recommendations, offering customized advice on fertilizer advice, planting dates, cultivars, and more. It uses extensive data from field trials, market trends, climate, soil, and topography to provide accurate, context-specific recommendations. The deployment process includes demand articulation, co-creation, and recommendations validation with partners like national systems, farmer organizations, and NGOs. AgWise combines data science, machine learning, and modeling techniques to improve crop productivity by up to 30%, potentially closing a third of yield gaps in sub-Saharan Africa, while optimizing fertilizer use and reducing environmental impact.
Target Users
Immediate users are typically in-country partners across public and private sectors who can disseminate these recommendations in English and/or local languages through websites, Chatbots or other digital and analog channels. They include national agricultural and extension system personnel, NGOs, and companies. Scientists in the agricultural sector are also potential immediate users of AgWise, examining and reusing its modeling workflows and algorithms.
Development & versioning
AgWise v1.0 is currently operational, building on AKILIMO, NextGen and RiceAdvice, among others. It is scalable and can be deployed globally for any crop, provided there is sufficient crop response data.
It scores 9/9 for innovation readiness and 6/9 for innovation use of the CGIAR innovation readiness and use calculators.
AgWise v2.0 is expected to be available in 2025-2026 with the addition of recommendations accounting for seasonal weather forecast and organic inputs. New services are also being developed to speed deployment in data-scarce areas, using a similarity mapping tool to identify regions with similar biophysical conditions.
Funding for AgWise was provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through the CGIAR Excellence in Agronomy Initiative.
V.1.0
The team
Developed collaboratively by several CGIAR centers, AgWise harnesses the collective expertise of agronomists, crop modelers, data scientists, GIS and remote sensing specialists, data mangers and IT experts. This collaborative effort ensures that AgWise is enriched with diverse perspectives and experiences from previous initiatives/efforts such as AKILIMO, GAIA, EDACaP, and NextGen.
AgWise algorithms and documentation are available on GitHub