A team constituted by the West Africa Food System Resilience Programme (FSRP) and made up of technical officers jointly from the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) , the Ghana Meteorological Agency (GMet) and FSRP has been deployed into eleven (11) regions to validate customized district-specific cropping and poultry production calendars and advisories, for use by farmers during the 2025 major farming season, in the southern half of Ghana.
The team (referred to as the “Deep Dive Team”) is working with regional and district agric directors, senior regional meteorological directors and regional livestock officials in the Central, Western, Eastern, Volta, Oti, Greater Accra, Ashanti, Western North, Bono, Bono East, and Ahafo regions.
2025 MAJOR SEASON FORECASTS (Southern Ghana)
The Calendars were developed based on Major Season forecasts collated by the Ghana Meteorological Agency (GMet) for the 2025 Major Season – covering the Southern half of Ghana, from March till July 2025. This year’s forecasts indicate early onsets (beginning of rainfall), high cumulative rain (rainfall amount or volume), early cessations (end of rainfall season), amid long dry spells (periods of no rainfall).
CRITICAL DECISIONS
With the GMet forecasts signaling erratic deviations from known annual rainfall patterns, the emerging district customized cropping calendars are consequently displaying significant shifts from the known standard cropping calendars, in most cases, by some weeks. Agrometeorological Advisories on climate-smart practices to be adopted by farmers are therefore being enlisted for mass dissemination by MoFA. In addition to these, district agric officials and agric extension agents would be keenly monitoring weekly weather updates and guiding farmers accordingly.
The northern half of Ghana would have their session when the 2025 Major Season Forecast Report (Northern Ghana) is released - expected in late April 2025. The ongoing collaborations between MoFA and GMet, (the first such collaborations in Ghana), was occasioned under the West Africa Food System Resilience Programme (FSRP).
MOFA-FSRP AUTOMATED WEATHER STATIONS
MoFA, through FSRP, has procured and installed 20 Automated Weather Stations at strategic locations around the country to enable GMet to collate accurate, instantaneous, location-specific forecasts. Hitherto,GMet's field officials gather and analyse data manually and laboriously, which sometimes yield inaccurate results, leading to misleading forecasts. FSRP's AWSs collate, analyse and upload unadulterated data for more reliable agrometeorological forecasts and advisories.
ABOUT FSRP
FSRP is a Government of Ghana project, funded by the World Bank and coordinated by ECOWAS among West African participating countries.
In Ghana, it is being implemented under the supervision of MoFA. FSRP’s development objective is to strengthen food system risk management, improve the sustainability of the agricultural productive base and harmonize agricultural markets (within the West African sub region).
Component 1 of FSRP aims at improving digital advisory services to support timely agriculture and food crisis prevention and management; and to strengthen national capacity to provide demand-driven digital advisory services. This includes agro-advisory and impact-based hydromet/climate information and early warning services, and promote their use for food crisis prevention, management, and response.
"GAME-CHANGER!"
The installation of the Automated Weather Stations and the formation of the joint MoFA-GMet “Deep Dive Team” feed into FSRP’s Component 1 “Game-Changer” objective.
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