Measuring Kenyan Forests with Rabobank’s Acorn Project

In the Embu region of Kenya, open fields of green tea glow in the sun. But Acorn, a project of Rabobank, hopes the future is somewhat shadier.

Acorn uses financial incentives to encourage agroforestry, a more forested farming practice in which crops and trees grow together, biodiversity increases, and carbon is removed from the atmosphere.

To properly assess tree growth, Acorn relies on two kinds of observation: satellite overviews and ground truth inputs from local partners. The ground truth process can be time and labor-intensive. Enumerators armed with tape measures and notebooks visit fields to count and measure trees.

“We can just walk around, and it does it automatically.”

When Acorn’s Kyle Nielsen first encountered Agerpoint’s ability to digitally model trees in three dimensions, he envisioned a better way to capture ground truth.

“If our enumerators could go out [and] take those 3D model trees, they don’t have to do tape measures anymore,” he thought. “They don’t have to identify the species themselves. They don’t have to write down on a piece of paper or put in an app what tree that was.”

Intrigued by the possibilities, Kyle and his team put the Agerpoint Capture app to the test in Embu.

“What we can do just with the app is we can just walk around and it does it automatically.  Captures all the information. At night you just send it up to the cloud, and it processes all the data for us,” says Kyle.

He points out digital ground truthing is valuable both for Acorn leaders, who can use the 3D models to virtually visit the field, and the enumerators themselves. 

“If it speeds up their data collection process, it means they can go home a lot quicker.”

Kyle says he’s “really excited about the Agerpoint technology, because I can just see what it’s going to do.”

“You don’t have to bring truckloads of equipment.”

Kenyan farmer Catherine Nyagah is also excited. She tried the Agerpoint Capture app on her farm in Embu County.

Agerpoint data “will help us plan well for the future,” she says.

She points out that by using a smartphone, “you don’t have to bring truckloads of equipment.”

“It’s an app on the phone. You get your answers, you move forward.”

The shadier future turns out to be brighter than ever.