No agricultural intelligence platform can function without data. This article provides a comprehensive inventory of the 22 data sources that KilimoPRO integrates — every source has been verified to exist and to provide data that can be programmatically consumed.
Kenyan Government Sources
- KilimoSTAT (statistics.kilimo.go.ke) — Kenya's official agricultural statistics platform with a documented Swagger API at /api/swagger/. Provides production stats, crop data, livestock, fisheries, food security, and climate indicators.
- KALRO Digital Agriculture Platform (keep.kalro.org) — Land, soil, and crop data with decision-support tools for climate-smart agriculture. Developed with World Bank support.
- KAOP (Kenya Agricultural Observatory Platform) — Ward-level weather forecasts, integrated with KALRO. Provides gridded forecasts at approximately 5km resolution.
- KADP (Kenya Agriculture Data Sharing Platform) — Open data initiative by KALRO for agricultural research data.
- ASDG Portal (agdata.go.ke) — Centralized portal for agricultural data sharing across government agencies.
- AIRC (airc.kilimo.go.ke) — Agriculture Information Resource Centre, manages the Ministry Call Centre and compiles weekly market price bulletins covering 100+ markets.
- KMD (meteo.go.ke) — Kenya Meteorological Department, provides weather forecasts and climate data.
- KNBS (knbs.or.ke) — Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, provides Economic Survey data and census data.
International Sources
- FAOSTAT API (api.fao.org) — The world's largest agricultural statistics database, with a new API Developer Portal launched in late 2024. SDMX-based REST API. Free access. Over 3 million time-series records.
- Google Earth Engine — Cloud-based platform for planetary-scale geospatial analysis. Free for research. Provides Sentinel-2 (10m, 5-day revisit), Landsat (30m, 16-day), MODIS (250m, daily), and CHIRPS rainfall (5km, daily).
- Sentinel-2 (Copernicus) — European Space Agency satellite providing 10m optical imagery every 5 days. Free and open access.
- Landsat (NASA) — 50+ year satellite record, 30m resolution, 16-day revisit. Free and open access.
- ARDC / Digital Earth Africa — Africa Regional Data Cube, launched in Nairobi in 2018. 17 years of analysis-ready satellite data for Kenya using Open Data Cube technology.
- CHIRPS — Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Station data. Daily rainfall at 5km resolution, with a particular focus on Africa. Free access.
- OpenWeatherMap API — Global weather data, current conditions and forecasts. Free tier available.
- World Bank Data API — GDP, population, and agricultural indicators. Free REST API.
Communications & Research
- Africa's Talking — SMS, USSD, and Voice API with coverage in all 54 African countries. Essential for the SMS/USSD fallback channel.
- PlantVillage Dataset — 54,305 images of 14 crop species and 26 diseases, from Penn State University. Free open dataset for training crop disease detection models.
- Semantic Scholar API — Academic paper search with 200M+ papers. Free tier (rate-limited). Used for the "Research" module that shows farmers latest research on their crops.
- Firecrawl — Web scraping API that converts any URL to LLM-ready markdown. Used to scrape agricultural news, market prices, and extension content.
Integration Architecture
Integrating 22 data sources requires a well-designed data pipeline. Each source has a dedicated connector service that handles authentication, data fetching, parsing, and error handling. Connectors run on scheduled intervals (daily for market prices, every 5 days for satellite imagery) and write normalized data to a central PostgreSQL database. A data quality validation layer checks incoming data for completeness and consistency.