We mapped every active crop field in Mozambique from satellite imagery — about 17 million of them.
Research with Pauline Lucie Hammer, Leon-Friedrich Thomas, Sá Nogueira Lisboa, Natasha Ribeiro, Almeida Sitoe, Patrick Hostert & Patrick Meyfroidt
Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 21, 084009 · Published 23 April 2026
DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ae5cb4
Smallholder farming systems in sub-Saharan Africa are notoriously difficult to map from space. Fields are small, landscapes are fragmented, and …
This blog post was written jointly with Cristina Chiarella for the Land Systems for Sustainability Lab website
Smallholder farmers in Mozambique call their fields machambas.
Machambas constitute a key source of income and food to most smallholders in this region. Definitions of what constitutes a smallholder are manifold, but in the majority of cases, the term relates to the land area available for production. As such, “smallholder” is an umbrella term for diverse modes of production and cannot …