**5. Conclusions**

Rainfall in SSA can vary significantly among neighboring fields within a small area, with a distance of less than 200 m between fields, impacting crop yields. The variability in daily rainfall amounts in space is more determinant on crop yield than the total seasonal rainfall variability. The rainfall spatiotemporal variability over such a small distance can result in significant yield variability among farmers. Scattering fields can help farmers to avoid the risk of losing an entire season's harvest by enabling farmers to obtain at least some seasonal yield from locations that received sufficient rain. The use of tied ridges as an infield rain water harvesting system helps to improve yields more than flat cultivation. We recommend this technique as one of the strategies to help farmers reduce yield losses in semiarid areas.

**Author Contributions:** F.R.S. was involved in conceptualizing the idea, data collection and analysis, experimentation, writing method, implementation, data presentation, writing the original draft paper, and organizing co-authors views. F.G. streamlined the concept, helped in fund acquisition, revised the design of the paper, contributed to its writing, provided additional literature, supervised the whole writing process and administration of the project that financed the work. S.D.B.-K. contributed during conceptualization of the idea, funding acquisition, supported data collection by providing additional resources (moisture measuring tools), and supervision. S.D.T. contributed by revising the idea, assisted in supervising data collection, and provided the reviews to the original draft. F.C.K. contributed during data collection, revised methodology, provided the resource during field work, and supervised the field work. M.A.L. assisted with the conceptualization of the work, supervision of data collection and analysis, revised the method, and completed an overall review of the paper.

**Funding:** The research conducted in this study was funded the German Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food (BMEL) in the form of the PhD program of the Federal Office of Agriculture and Food (BLE). The preparation and publication of this article is funded by the Leibniz Center for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF).

**Acknowledgments:** The authors are grateful to the agricultural field officer Fadhili Mbaga for the assistance during data collection and all famers in Idifu village. We also thank the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.
