Cereal grain mineral micronutrient and soil chemistry data from GeoNutrition surveys in Ethiopia and Malawi

Through the GeoNutrition project, 1352 georeferenced staple cereal grain and soil sample pairs from Ethiopia’s Amhara, Oromia, and Tigray regions and 1812 sample pairs from Malawi were collected from farms under a rainfed and smallholder farming systems. Field metadata was collected using KoBoCollect, an open-source georeferenced mobile data collection application. The elemental concentration in the staple cereals and soil properties were determined using standard wet chemistry digestion, extraction, and analysis procedures. A total of 29 cereal grain elemental concentrations from Ethiopia and Malawi, and 84 and 69 soil elemental concentrations or fractions from Ethiopia and Malawi, respectively were analysed and reported in these datasets. The major staple cereal crops sampled from Ethiopia included barley (n=175), finger millet (n=37), maize (n=290), sorghum (n=135), Teff (n=362), and wheat (n=325). Staple cereals collected from Malawi included maize (n=1608), pearl millet (n=32), rice (n=54) and sorghum (n=117). The datasets are presented in a workbook or zipped comma separated value (CSV) file for Ethiopia and Malawi. These datasets may be of interest to researchers, public institutions and non-governmental organisations working in the fields of agriculture, public health and nutrition, environmental protection, and fertiliser development.