OlmoEarth's impact: IFPRI/CGIAR

Across the world, smallholder farmer activities evolve year to year, yet up-to-date crop maps are rarely available. Knowing what farmers are growing, where, is vital information to address food security challenges in an effective and efficient way. Timely crop maps inform better policymaking on agricultural investments and subsidies, enable relief and humanitarian organizations to plan interventions, and drive agricultural markets and trades.

We built the OlmoEarth Platform to improve crop-type map accuracy and save time for planners, who are often faced with creating one-off mapping solutions from scratch. OlmoEarth consolidates a workflow that enables authorities to quickly and easily update maps, allowing them to refresh crop intelligence—as seen in Kenya’s Nandi County.

Our partners at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), which works to provide evidence to support policies that bolster agricultural economies and reduce poverty, started with ground-truth observations collected in the field. IFPRI then ran the model for the current year and the five previous years to see the change over time.

Leveraging OlmoEarth Platform and our new family of OlmoEarth models as the foundation, map generation took just days—saving time and effort while improving accuracy.

“We are excited to see the level of detail and accuracy in the new crop-type maps generated by OlmoEarth for Nandi County, exceeding our initial expectations,” says Zhe Guo, Senior GIS Coordinator at IFPRI. “These maps will enable food value chain actors – including farmers, input suppliers, traders, and local authorities – to make timely, data-driven decisions for profitable farming. Our team will continue using this innovative approach to generate reliable time-series data to support these stakeholders and strengthen local agricultural resilience in the coming years.”

For Nandi, IFPRI generated crop-type maps so county leaders can see how patterns shifted over time—for example, the expansion of sugarcane and coffee production, as well as climate-smart crop varieties. That “then versus now” perspective turns incomplete or outdated information into clear evidence for managing change.

In Mozambique, where the agricultural industry employs over 70% of the population, the stakes are high. Every year, floods, cyclones, and droughts drive acute food insecurity by disrupting agricultural production and access to markets. Timely crop and rangeland maps aren't just useful—they're essential.

Through our collaboration with IFPRI and the University of Twente, OlmoEarth is helping to track cultivated areas within growing seasons to estimate production prospects—and across years to assess climate change impacts. The same platform that delivered results in Kenya in days is strengthening Mozambique's capacity to anticipate food security crises, guide agricultural investments, and help mitigate the cascading effects of climate disasters.

“Mozambique is one of the most challenging countries to develop accurate crop maps due to frequent floods, cyclones, and droughts,” says Jawoo Koo, Senior Research Fellow at IFPRI. “We are thrilled that the new AI-driven approach using OlmoEarth will enable timely crop-type mapping. This will allow policymakers and humanitarian organizations to accurately assess the impacts of seasonally repeated climate extremes when they need the information most. We will help our local partners to raise their technical capacity to incorporate OlmoEarth in their food security monitoring effort.”

Whether in Kenya or Mozambique, accurate maps – made possible by OlmoEarth – enable IFPRI and our other partners to assist farmers and policymakers in planning supply chains in advance, monitoring areas needing reforestation, and implementing sustainable land management practices. Our work with IFPRI is also informing advisory services and tracking the adoption of the aforementioned climate-smart crop varieties.

We see OlmoEarth Platform as an intelligence layer built to support government agencies and development partners in making proactive, evidence-based decisions to protect livelihoods and build resilience before crises hit. Nandi and Mozambique are just the start—we're actively scaling the approach to several other countries in Africa and beyond.