Mapping Crops with Smartphone Crowdsourcing, Satellite Imagery, and Deep Learning
Smallholder farms — holdings of less than 2 hectares — produce one-third of global food consumed, employ 2 billion people, and make up 84% of the world’s farms. Yet our collective knowledge of their food production remains limited: questions like what crop types smallholders are growing and where they grow them remain unanswered, making it hard to track yield progress, study farming practices, and design agricultural policies. The data gap exists because most smallholders are located in countries where the ability to conduct surveys — the traditional way of obtaining farm-level information — is still nascent or under development.
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