Solar solutions for farmers in The Gambia

Visiting farms in The Gambia, students with Engineers Without Borders at Penn (EWB at Penn) saw firsthand the local challenges of irrigating crops, such as rice, eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, bananas, and cassava.

In conventional irrigation systems, diesel fuel or grid electricity powers pumps that carry water from a borehole either into drip irrigation lines on the ground or directly into a holding tank. But diesel is detrimental to worker health, and the Gambian power grid is unreliable. Additionally, if the line pressure is low, workers must manually transport water to the farthest reaches of a farm.

Some farms have solar-powered irrigation systems but may not have a battery for energy storage—an issue because farmers water their crops in the early morning and late afternoon, when evaporation rates are lower, but solar panels produce the most energy mid-day.

This semester, students from EWB at Penn—a nonprofit humanitarian organization focused on sustainable development worldwide—are designing a solar-powered irrigation system with a battery for FAIR Farms Gambia, a demonstration and research farm co-founded by School of Veterinary Medicine and Graduate School of Education alumna Brianna Parsons, who is now the One Health Program Manager at Penn Vet.

In January, undergraduate students Laila Farhan, Chloe Furst, Jack Leitzell, and Iris Wong traveled to The Gambia with School of Engineering and Applied Science professor Lorena Grundy, faculty mentor for EWB at Penn, to understand farmers’ current practices and future hopes.

Community-informed design

The students visited FAIR Farms plus four other Gambian farms run by locals, two of whom sit on FAIR Farms’ board of directors.

Chloe Furst, a second-year chemical and biomolecular engineering major from Philadelphia says the team noted established practices across the farms and asked, “How do you wish to improve your system?” She says they learned a lot from FAIR Farms co-founder Sulay Camara, a Gambian agro-farmer, such as how the economy and infrastructure in the country is developing rapidly. But The Gambia still relies heavily on food imports; for example, most rice—a dietary staple—is imported.

“Local agriculture drives self-sufficiency in the country, and water is critical to making that happen,” says EWB at Penn Co-President Iris Wong, a third-year bioengineering major from Hong Kong.

Grundy says one consequence of rapid development is that issues arise with irrigation systems because farmers don’t have the resources for modeling and calculations, requiring a redesign. “The students will hopefully design a system from the beginning that avoids that,” she says.

Furst says that the next step is doing calculations to determine how many pumps are necessary to maintain adequate water pressure in the irrigation lines. She is co-leading this project with third-year bioengineering major Laila Farhan, who is from Media, Pennsylvania.

Farhan notes that with a variety of engineering backgrounds in EWB at Penn, students learn from each other—she hasn’t taken fluid dynamics but others have, for example—and from professors. She says the goal is to finish the design by late spring, before the rainy season.

Jack Leitzell, a third-year chemical and biomolecular engineering major from Philadelphia who was co-project lead with Farhan in the fall, says that Parsons and Camara will then source the necessary parts in The Gambia and contract a local team to construct a borehole and assemble the irrigation system. Wong says the team is grateful for financial support from Bentley Systems, a Philadelphia-based infrastructure engineering software company.

Addressing local needs while educating students

Parsons says that FAIR Farms has a long history of collaborations with Penn, working with Penn Vet, Penn Global, the Wharton School, Penn Abroad, and more. She first connected with Grundy more than a year ago through Penn’s Climate and Health Education Working Group, and Grundy shared that EWB at Penn was looking for international projects. They agreed that FAIR Farms would be a great fit.

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“Collaborating with the EWB at Penn team is a great educational partnership, and bringing them to The Gambia to develop this critical system led to evidence-based plans grounded in realities of life in The Gambia,” Parsons says.

The impact extends beyond FAIR Farms’ five-hectare research and demonstration farm, which welcomes both local and international visitors. “FAIR Farms Gambia’s approach takes risks to produce local agricultural research and encourages farmers to amplify best practices, seeing productive, resilient, and sustainable agriculture with their own eyes,” Parsons says.

Wong also emphasizes the educational opportunity for Penn students. She says that in classes, students are doing projects but rarely interacting with stakeholders. Here, students are not only interacting with stakeholders but also fulfilling their engineering needs.

“I remember how worried I felt during a lead water contamination crisis back home, and so when I applied for Penn Engineering, I said I specifically wanted to work on water projects,” Wong says. “Being able to do that in a real, hands-on, impactful way means a lot to how we grow as engineers.”

All images are courtesy of Engineers Without Borders at Penn.