March 1, 2023・3 min read

Key Lessons from TomorrowNow and Tomorrow.io Farmer Visit

The team at TomorrowNow and Tomorrow.io head to the field to learn more from farmers about their need for weather intelligence and bring their stories to the global stage!

Kajiado, Kenya – The team at TomorrowNow visited farmers in Kajiado County,Kenya🇰🇪 to learn more about their on-farm decisions affected by weather & climate change and how TomorrowNow.org & partners are going to help them adapt and thrive in a changing climate using next generation weather innovations.

We were excited to be joined by Dan Slagen from our tech partner Tomorrow.io who got first hand experience about the impact of our work in East Africa & opportunities to do more leveraging partnerships involving private sector-led innovations like weather intelligence.

Farmer Justice is a young agricultural producer who has cultivated onions and tomatoes on a 3 acre piece of land. Due to weather variability, he has invested in greenhouse and drip irrigation technologies to ensure that he is able to crop off season.

He shared with our team about how weather variability affects critical activities on-farm, pointing out some of the negative impacts that he has confronted in his farming experience.

According to him, short rainy seasons that are frequented by climate change have affected the efficacy of water management on his farm owing to insufficient availability of water in wells.

The seasons have changed and he believes that advanced weather intelligence can help him overcome current uncertainties and plan farm activities better.

Elsewhere, we were fortunate to find Farmer Eric harvesting his crop of tomatoes that were being loaded onto a waiting van.

Although we could see a bumper harvest, he informed the team that he had been forced to downscale his production due to water challenges – access to reliable weather forecasts is going to help him manage farm resources better.

Farmer Eric asserted the importance of high quality weather information to enable him to plant early or delay the process as a strategy to align farming decisions with favorable prices at the market.

In highlight, the team learnt from Farmer Alexina that weather variability has worsened pest stress and affected market price predictability. She said, “As farmers, we don’t know what to do when. Having access to quality weather information will help us plan accordingly and maximize productivity and profits.”

While reflecting on the lessons learnt from farmers about the opportunity of leveraging the power of weather intelligence to improve farming outcomes, Tomorrow.io CMO Dan Slagen affirmed our tech partner’s commitment to continue investing in next generation weather technologies to support TomorrowNow’s work serving smallholder farmers and farmer-facing organizations such as KALRO.

Georgina Campbell Flatter

Georgina is the co-founder and Executive Director of TomorrowNow.org - a global non profit leveraging transformative philanthropy to connect next generation weather and climate technologies with communities in need. Prior to TomorrowNow.org, Georgina spent a decade at MIT where she was a senior lecturer and led global initiatives designed to bridge technology and social impact. Georgina has worked on many innovation initiatives for organisations including: the MIT Legatum Center, MIT REAP, the XPRIZE Foundation, the World Bank, USA Dept of Energy, MIT, Harvard and Oxford University. Georgina is mother of two, passionate about empowering the next generation of STEM leaders, with a focus on women and youth, and is an active member of her local community. She acts as trustee and advisory board member for several charities (The Darwin Centre, Mama Foundation, FOSPs) and is a local Parish Councillor. She read Material Science at Trinity College Oxford and Technology and Policy at MIT.