write here...Considering the dangers that fossil fuels have brought, there is need to explore other cleaner and sustainable means which can last a life.

Soybean is an important component of smallholder farmer cropping systems in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) . There are well -documented advantages of soybean in SSA such as improving soil fertility for the benefit of other crops (due to nitrogen fixing ability), providing increased food and nutrition security (soybeans have high protein content), increased rural incomes and employment opportunities, and relatively low production and storage costs. However, average yields in SSA (1.5 tons/ha) are much lower than the global average of nearly 2.5 tons/ha. The IITA soybean breeding programme in Zambia is working to develop improved varieties that are adapted to local growing conditions and provide enhanced productivity. An essential part of the soybean breeding process is testing selected lines in trials on multiple smallholder farms, mostly in rural regions of Zambia. This is essential to ensure varieties perform well in the field under a range of different environments and varying farm practice. Monitoring and measuring the results of these trials (typically in the region of 1000 individual farms) is extremely time-consuming complicated by the travel distances involved. Hence being able to monitor crop performance remotely would greatly enhance the value of these smallholder field trials and speed up the selection of high performing lines. This project will bring together image analysis, crop and breeding expertise to investigate how we can use satellite data to efficiently and accurately monitor crop performance remotely at these sites throughout Zambia. Crop performance data will be combined with local weather data to enable prediction of how varieties perform under different environmental conditions. Remote data image analysis work at Manchester will be complemented with ground-truth data from the IITA in Zambia.

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