Evaluating Agronomic Onset Definitions in Senegal through Crop Simulation Modeling

Rainfed agriculture in Senegal is heavily affected by weather-related risks, particularly timing of start/end of the rainy season. For climate services in agriculture, the National Meteorological Agency (ANACIM) of Senegal has defined an onset of rainy season based on the rainfall. In the field, however, farmers do not necessarily follow the ANACIM’s onset definition. To close the gap between the parallel efforts by a climate information producer (i.e., ANACIM) and its actual users in agriculture (e.g., farmers), it is desirable to understand how the currently available onset definitions are linked to the yield of specific crops. In this study, we evaluated multiple onset definitions, including rainfall-based and soil-moisture-based ones, in terms of their utility in sorghum production using the DSSAT–Sorghum model. The results show that rainfall-based definitions are highly variable year to year, and their delayed onset estimation could cause missed opportunities for higher yields with earlier planting. Overall, soil-moisture-based onset dates determined by a crop simulation model produced yield distributions closer to the ones by semi-optimal planting dates than the other definitions, except in a relatively wet southern location. The simulated yields, particularly based on the ANACIM’s onset definition, showed statistically significant differences from the semi-optimal yields for a range of percentiles (25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th) and the means of the yield distributions in three locations. The results emphasize that having a good definition and skillful forecasts of onset is critical to improving the management of risks of crop production in Senegal.