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AI tool for mapping smallholder crops proves itself in Senegal

cam.ac.uk · 3h · first reportShare

AI tool for mapping smallholder crops proves itself in Senegal Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/29/2026 - 08:00 A new analysis of Senegalese croplands using an artificial intelligence developed at the University of Cambridge shows how technological benefits enjoyed by industrial agriculture could be brought to smallholder farms in Senegal and other countries in the Global South. Researchers used Cambridge’s Tessera , an open-source AI model trained on satellite images, to map crops in Senegal’s groundnut basin. They found that Tessera was more accurate than current methods, getting the right result 84% of the time in tests while using only a fraction of computational resources and pre-labelled data. In one scenario, it performed 28% better than the next-best model. This suggests that Tessera could become an important tool for governments and food security organisations, particularly in areas in the Global South where ground data is difficult or expensive to gather, said lead author Mad