The Role of Soil Moisture Information in Developing Robust Climate Services for Smallholder Farmers: Evidence from Ghana

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear appreciated Authors,

The manuscript" The role of soil moisture information in developing robust climate services for smallholder farmers: evidence from Ghana” is acceptable for publication after Minor revision.

The manuscript deals to assess the role of soil moisture information in farmers’ agricultural decision-making and to understand how this information is being perceived, assessed and applied by farmers. The topic gives important information how to improve a Climate Information Services (CIS) embedded with soil moisture advisory module (CIS-SM) which could help farmers in conducting strategic and tactical decision-making in their daily farming activities. This is an interesting manuscript and has the potential to be of interest to farmers, agronomists, soil scientists and decision makers.

Overall, the manuscript presents high quality of dissemination and the exploitation of project research results in agriculture and can be readily accessed and used by different end users (researchers, policy makers, programme planners, managers and farmers) during and beyond the life of the project. However, while the results are quite interesting and well described with appropriate methods and analyses, I suggest the authors to revise the manuscript for the following points:

Line 17:  I would like to suggest to change the sentence schedule as: Agriculture across many regions in the global south, such as Africa, Latin America, and South Asia, depend mainly on rain precipitation for their staple food production [1].

Line 26:  Therefore, accessibility of hydroclimatic information services is of utmost importance for sustainable rainfed agricultural practices and leads to higher yields and minimum risk of crop failure [10,11]

Line 42: Gbangou et al. [27] conducted an experimental coproduction of CIS in Ghana that involved a user-driven design and testing of information and communications technology-based digital tools, such as using smartphones and similar applications.

Line 154: For that reason, farmers were asked to consider how their answers reflect the available information in the existing systems and their needs.

Line 176: Please clarify explanation in sentence.

Line 235: Instead word "how", I suggest: "amount of significance of information...

Line 258: In farmers examination regarding their awareness (Another formulation of sentence)

Line 291: I suggest instead of number "1"-month to put words: one month lead time 

With kind regards,

NL

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

The authors' rebuttal is attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

General comments: The importance of soil moisture information in developing dependable climate services for smallholder farmers' agricultural decision-making is discussed by the authors. The current research work style, in my opinion, is well-planned and ready for publication in MDPI's Agronomy journal. As a result, I feel the work, with minimal revisions, might be accepted for publishing in this Journal.

Specific comments:

1. In lines 52, 138, 380, 433, please correct according to journal guidelines.
2. The English language and style are acceptable; however, a slight spell check is required.

Author Response

The authors' rebuttal is attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The below-suggested comments could be useful to improve the quality of the manuscript.
1.    The abstract needs to be modified significantly by including the objective of the review along with the flow of discussed contents and concussion.
2.    Overall, the manuscript needs to be revised critically by modifying the length and flow of discussion, figures quality, and table representation.
3.    Some of the highlights are meaningless, it should be revised as per the journal standard.
4.    Conclusion should be revised
5.    Add some new information in the introduction section 
6.    Reference is not following the journal guideline. Revised it 
7.    Reference -   It is better to use only citations within 15 years of the study for increased reliability of the results, some citations are found to be outdated. 
8.    The manuscript showed both % and unit in several places, it should be clear with unit or percentage
9.    Overall, the manuscript needs to be revised critically by modifying the length and flow of discussion, figures quality, and table representation.

Author Response

The authors' rebuttal is attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

Title: The role of soil moisture information in developing robust climate services for smallholder farmers: evidence from Ghana

Manuscript Number: 1591147

To

The Editor

Journal of Agronomy

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am thankful to provide me this manuscript for review. Now I read manuscript thoroughly and submitting my comments for your kind consideration. I personally found that authors have done good efforts to collect this information in the manuscript. I would like to suggest that the manuscript can be accepted in the Journal for publication. However, I have some suggestions for the quality of manuscript and its wide readership. The details of comments area as follows:

Comments:

• No outcome of the CIS-SM model is given in abstract.
• Line 118,119. the scientific name should be italic “Vitellaria Paradoxa” and “Parkia Biglobosa”  and species name should be in small letter i.e., Vitellaria paradoxa” and “Parkia biglobosa
• Figure 1. The co-ordinate should be given in map
• During interviews what usually questions were asked to be mentioned. Although, questioner is given.
• Table-2: Is there any relation among No 3 (Farmer received SM information), No 4 (Importance of SM information) and No 6 (Importance of SM forecast) because all are related to moisture percent.
• Table -3 Sl 2 “Vitellaria paradox” this scientific name should be italic
• Conclusion is very long only important information to be given

 

 

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

The authors' rebuttal is attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf