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Crowd-funding farm equipment

Jul 31 2026 · 4 min read
#mozambique #smallholders #activism
Farming in Mozambique Over 82% of Mozambique’s population lives on less than US$3 a day, making Mozambique the second poorest country in the world. On my travels in northern Mozambique, I experience the realities of life for people living in extreme poverty first hand. In most regions of rural Mozambique, access to electricity is limited, infrastructure is in a poor condition, only about one in three children attends school and there is hardly any functioning healthcare system.
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Blurry Vision?

Jul 1 2026 · 11 min read
#deep learning #earth observation #embeddings
Do learning paradigms in context-aware Earth embeddings suppress spatial variability? Geospatial embeddings (GE) offer user-friendly representations of large EO image archives with competitive performance across numerous predictive mapping applications. A wealth of GE are available, including Alpha Earth Foundations, TESSERA, or Major TOM. Importantly, architectures behind GE differ fundamentally - we can discriminate pixel-level against context-aware architectures: embeddings based on …
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Mapping 17 million fields in Mozambique

Apr 23 2026 · 3 min read
#deep learning #smallholders #earth observation #mozambique
We mapped every active crop field in Mozambique from very-high resolution satellite imagery — about 17 million of them. This is part of my research done with Pauline Lucie Hammer, Leon-Friedrich Thomas, Sá Nogueira Lisboa, Natasha Ribeiro, Almeida Sitoe, Patrick Hostert & Patrick Meyfroidt. For details, please see the corresponding paper published in Environmental Research Letters, DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ae5cb4 Smallholder farming systems in sub-Saharan Africa are notoriously difficult to …
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Machambas

May 22 2022 · 5 min read
#smallholders #mozambique
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 …
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