The just ended partnership meeting of the World Cocoa Foundation under the theme “The New Frontiers of Cocoa Sustainability”, which took place at the Hilton Morumbi in São Paulo, Brazil from October 24-25, 2018 was a melting pot for networking of all major stakeholders in the cocoa sector across the globe.
As part of this two-day event, the Coordinator for the CocoaSoils Program, Dr. Richard Asare was invited as a panelist on “Pathways to Productivity” and to participate as a marketplace exhibitor, where he showcased his latest innovation, the “CanOvaLator” – The canopy cover calculator for cocoa growing systems.
The CanOvaLator is an offline Mobile App that computes the amount of canopy cover provided by 28 different tree species per unit area for cocoa cultivation. This user-friendly tool is a transformed output of a research study by Asare and Ræbild (2016), which shows that the Crown Area of an individual species is dependent on the age of the tree manifested in the diameter at breast height (DBH).
The Mobile App allows a user to specify a farm size and the DBH of trees planted on the farm. The App then computes the crown area for each of the trees and finally computes the Percentage Canopy Cover provided by these trees with respect to the farm size.
Its target user group includes extension officers, researchers, farmers and other service delivery agents in cocoa farming.