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Although the boundaries used for crop reporting do nominally align with the Ad 2 level Provinces, crop data for the 1984-1996 period are reported using the 1997 Province boundaries, in order to be consistent with a retro-active recompilation by Government of crop data from that period into the 1997 boundaries. This allow allows all crop data between 1984 and the present (April 2024) to be comparable with any other year in terms of yields and quantity of production.
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The original source data are reported in multiple, non-overlapping production systems that were not previously captured, leading to the use of the Dominant Production System Production System (PS) codes below.
As context, most crops are grown during the main rainy-season by small-holders with few resources. . Over the last 20 years, Burkina has expanded the number of small water retention dams, leading to an increase in small-holder irrigated production.
Plaine/Bas-fond irrigated (PS): In BF there has been extensive development of “plaines” “plaines” (irrigated fields with bunding) and “bas“bas-fonds amenagés” amenagés” (irrigated bas-fonds, or low-lying areas that may fill during the rains, and which are irrigated using that rainwater, or other drawn from a near-by source: ergo, and not necessarily just rain-fed). Some of these areas are managed by cooperative groupings, and others may be small-scale commercial in nature. Some of these may be growing veggies and other crops outside of the rainy season, although not reported.
Bas-fonds rainfed (PS): There is another more-common bas-fonds farming system that is only fed by rainfall and is not irrigated or managed (amenagé) in the same way.
Rainfed (PS): this category covers everything else that is grown in fields, often dispersed and planted with multiple crops, during the rainy season without irrigation and with few resources.
Season dates
The main rainy season varies by latitude, beginning earlier in the South, and later in the North, and ending earlier in the North than in the South. The start of the main rains comes as early as the beginning of April. Harvesting of crops after the end of the rains is generally completed by the end of October. Off-season (dry season) irrigated crops, mainly garden vegetables and sometimes rice, are undertaken in some areas with water resources, and comprise some part of the “irrigated” crop production reported in the official statistics.
Season dates in the FDW now are wrong. They are corrected in this spreadsheet. See the “Season” tab in the spreadsheet describing correct seasons and dates (not all of which are used here in these data).
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