The document discusses the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's agricultural development strategy and its focus on improving productivity and reducing poverty for smallholder farmers. The strategy aims to increase productivity for 75 million households in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia by 2030. It emphasizes partnerships, priority staple crops and livestock, and achieving scale through anchor countries and products. The need for better soil information and data is also discussed to help analyze constraints, guide management practices, and monitor environmental impacts at multiple levels from landscape to field.

1. The Need for Soil Information in the
Foundations’ Agricultural
Development Strategy
Christian Witt
Senior Program Officer, Agricultural Development
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
20 March, 2012

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Our Goal
Reduce hunger and poverty by improving
self-sufficiency of poor farming families.

4. Focus on the staple crops and livestock
with the greatest impact on the poor
Focusing Our Strategy
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Building on the previous work of others
Learning from our work to date
Input from experts,
partners,
grantees, donors,
farmers, and
critics

5. Partnerships
We won’t succeed on our own.
We rely on partners to carry out the work.
• From developed and non-developed worlds
• From public, private and nonprofit sectors
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6. Goals
By 2030
Sub-Saharan Africa:
Increase sustainable
agricultural
productivity for 30
million poor farming
households by an
average of 170%,
contributing to a 40%
reduction in the
$1/day poverty rate.
South Asia:
Increase sustainable
agricultural
productivity for 45
million poor farming
households by an
average of 115%,
contributing to a 25%
reduction in the
$1/day poverty rate in
India and Bangladesh
Compatible with
MDG1a, targeting a
50% reduction in the
$1/day poverty rate
by 2015.
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7. 7
Our framework for achieving the objectives of our strategic
initiatives, and the ‘scope’ and ‘scale’ of our strategy
‘Scope’ is driven by our choice of anchor countries and products, ‘scale’ is driven by our target number of beneficiaries
[...]
Research & Development
 Crop improvement
 Livestock health & improvement
 Discovery research
 Local adaptation
Agricultural Policy
 Country policies
 Data & diagnostics
 Multilaterals
 Trade-offs and synergies
Access & Market Systems
 Input delivery
 Knowledge exchange
 Post-harvest and markets
 Regions
Other Areas
 Strategic partnerships
 Rural infrastructure
 Finance
 etc
Farmer
households
 Ramp up to
the # of farmer
households
targeted in our
strategy over
time
Countries
 BMGF’s anchor
countries
 Other donors’
anchor
countries
(which we call
‘spillover’
countries)
 Other countries
Products
 BMGF’s priority
crops and
livestock
Strategic initiatives Scope Scale
Unit
costs
Total investment over time
Average cost per farm
2030
$
2011
$ per
farm
# of farms
Analysis of strategic choices
Total
costs
ROI / trade-offs
Income
per
farm,$
# of farms
Farm-
level
Global
National
Maize
Rice
Ethiopia Mali

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13. The Need for Soil Information
Desired Functions
 Assessment of the soil resource base
 Yield gap & constraint analysis / priority setting
(e.g., breeding, intensification potential, AWM solutions)
 Agronomic management from landscape to field
guided by the principles of agro-ecological
intensification
 Environmental monitoring
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14. Continued…
Guiding principles
 Solution, service and product orientation
 Recognition of customer need
 Innovative, catalytic, cost-effective
(e.g., new sensors, crowdsourcing)
 New business models / private – public partnerships
 National ownership and capacity
 International scientific standards leading to
interoperable soil information systems
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15. Thank You
© 2011 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. All Rights Reserved.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries.