The DROP app: a soil moisture enabled climate information service tailored to smallholder farmerseeds

Weather and Climate Information Services (WCIS) for agriculture provide weather
and climate forecasts on various timescales, but soil moisture information that is crucial for plant
growth and optimizing the agricultural yield is still missing. We, therefore, have developed DROP
app, a WCIS with a soil moisture module. This app was designed with and for smallholder farmers
working on rainfed agriculture in northern Ghana and has three main features: 1) information on
location-specific scientific weather forecasts (SF), 2) local weather forecasts (LF) from smallholder
farmers, and 3) the soil moisture forecasts. The forecasts generate a high probability of rain
detection (POD), with a minimum value of 0.7 obtained from LF. The hybrid forecast (HF) that
integrates the SF and LF yields the highest POD value of 0.9. However, the hybrid system also
has a high number of false alarms which results in an overall lower forecast performance of HF
compared to SF. More than half of the farmers (58%) perceived that soil moisture forecasts have
good performance. After the implementation of the app, farmers involved in the study were mostly
satisfied with the use and the features of the app. By using the app, they were able to adjust their
farming activities, such as sowing, planting and weeding dates, fertilizer and herbicide application,
and harvesting. Although some limitations exist, the DROP app has potential to be used worldwide
in order to deliver actionable knowledge on WCIS for climate-smart farm decision-making.