African Crop Calendar: Geo-Referenced Growing Seasons for Six Countries, 2009-2019

Sub-Saharan Africa is covered by this harmonized survey dataset describing crop growing seasons from six countries between 2009 and 2019. It provides cleaned and validated data on planting and harvesting dates, crop species, and anonymized field locations. The dataset was created by Katharina Waha and colleagues, published in 2026, and is sourced from the LSMS-ISA program.

Use Cases

• Modeling crop phenology and growing season length based on reported planting and harvesting dates.
• Assessing drivers of shifts in agricultural growing seasons based on harmonized survey data.
• Linking farm-level agricultural practices with climate or soil data based on geographical identifiers.
• Analyzing crop diversity and species distribution across agro-ecological regions in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Strengths

• Data is cleaned, harmonized, and validated, as described in the associated 2026 data publication.
• Includes geographical identifiers to link with external datasets like climate or soil data.
• Covers a 10-year time range (2009-2019) across six African countries.
• Standardized crop names and unique plot identifiers enhance consistency for analysis.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale modeling.
• The 89.6 MB file size suggests a relatively small dataset for geospatial-temporal analysis.

Provenance

Source

LSMS-ISA (Living Standards Measurement Study - Integrated Surveys on Agriculture) program.

Collection Method

Collected through large-scale agricultural household surveys, then harmonized and validated.

Time Range

2009-2019

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-21 12:07:48; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Six countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (specific countries not named).