Making good decisions in the field starts with knowing the weather. That is why the FONTAGRO-supported project installed 12 automatic weather stations, 8 in Nicaragua and 4 in Honduras, and trained 210 UNAG and ARSAGRO promoters and technicians in crop growth models, seasonal forecasting and online monitoring of maize and beans. An SMS platform sends these promoters agroclimatic information, recommendations and alerts, which they then share in their communities.

The system is completed by Agroclimatic Technical Tables, which translate climate forecasts into specific recommendations for each crop, published in bulletins and on a website with up-to-date station data. According to the 2018 poster, 1,146 trained farmers, a third of them women, were already using these recommendations to decide when and how to plant. By the end of the project, 17 technical tables were operating and 2,100 families were benefiting from agroclimatic information, an experience that attracted the interest of Honduras’s Ministry of Agriculture (SAG), the Central American Agricultural Council and the CGIAR’s CCAFS programme.

📄 Results presentation, 14th Annual Technical Monitoring Workshop 2019 (PDF, in Spanish)
📄 Project poster 2018 (PDF, in Spanish)
🔗 Project page (in Spanish)