The Modernizing Agriculture in Ghana (MAG) project is a government of Ghana project and operates under five main components. The Institute is involved in one of the components that focus on appropriate agricultural research and innovations that can enhance efficiency.

The key object of the project is leveraging ICT and Ghana’s abundant natural resource (sunshine) and its application in crop irrigation to augment governments’ effort in modernizing agriculture in Ghana. The project seeks to demonstrate a scalable model of solar cyber irrigation system for future deployment.

The expectation is to manage irrigation practices to ensure effective and efficient use of water and other resources by using soil system’s data and temperature sensors to manage actual conditions in the field as relayed. The interpretation of data and temperatures picked by sensors would trigger a response through a mobile phone application to show when irrigation is needed hence significantly increasing water use efficiency.

This is an innovation over the traditional irrigation methods when one may not be able to tell when plants need water and the exact quantity needed.

Using solar energy is sustainable and has positive impact on the environment as it reduces CO2 emissions. Due to its simplicity, the system can be operated by farmers at all levels, creating convenience and also reduce human intervention in irrigation as much as possible. This system will be of great benefit to farmers especially those who can’t frequently visit the farm. Aside agricultural farms, the solar cyber irrigation can be applied on lawns/gardens, water pumping for domestic/commercial use etc.

It is anticipated that the technology will help promote all year farming, draw more youth into agriculture and ultimately produce greater economic outcomes to create more employment opportunities to improve livelihoods and help stabilize the prices of food crops in the country.

It is intended that upon the successful implementation of this project, a smart irrigation technology that is environmentally friendly, efficient and allows the farmer to control irrigation remotely would be developed.