E-Agriculture

Question 3 (opens 24 Sept.)

Question 3 (opens 24 Sept.)

 How does ICT facilitate knowledge generation, documentation, and sharing in support of farmers and of farmer innovations? 

 


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Hi everyone. We're well into our second week of this discussion. The first week was excellent! Thank to you to everyone who particpated - reading or making inputs - and made it one of the best weeks ever.

Now the disucssion has moved on to focus on ICT and innovation by farmers. This is a critical part of the innovation system. Let us know about your experiences, challenges and questions.

cheers, Michael

Benjamin Kwasi Addom
Benjamin Kwasi AddomThe Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA)Netherlands

Yes, local farmers are innovators traditionally in agriculture and natural resource management and are also actively involved in ways of communicating outcomes/outputs through the new ICTs. So much work has been done on farmer innovations including my own dissertation.

The key for ICT innovators is to understand the traditional process of farmer innovations in order to succeed with the use of ICTs to support farmers. I have written a short blog based on how local farmers innovate. This framework was developed based on an empirical research carried out with farmers - How Local Farmers Innovate

What drives farmers to innovate? How do they do it - individually or collaboratively; totally new products/processes or modification of existing ones? How do they share these innovations among themselves.

We need to understand these as we design ICT innovations with farmers not for farmers. ICT Application Developers need to work with Rural Community Practitioners to succeed and meet project goals, if the ICT4Ag community genuinely wants to support the smallholder farmer.

Ben 

Saravanan Raj
Saravanan RajCentral Agricultural UniversityIndia

Hi Ben, As you indicated, some of the ICT projects in India eg. Village Knowledge Centres (VKCs) initiative of M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) works with resource poor farmers and farmers innovations were documented and shared with other farmers by ICTs and also through (local community based) print media in local language...

Rachel Zedeck
Rachel ZedeckBackpack Farm | KenyaKenya

At least here in East Africa, the community is driving demand for both technology and content through widespread adoption of mobile technologies.  So rather than ICT being the driver aren't communities themselves - a great framework for human centered design.  We can't create demand but we can respond to it.  Maybe we just need to become better listeners.

Bruce Kisitu
Bruce KisituKIVA Agro Supplies LtdUganda

Rachel, basing on your experience in East africa, how have the mobile technologies helped to generate knowlegde from farmers or from reasearchers and passed on to farmers? And how has this knowledge assisted farmers to be more innovative in their activities?

Rachel Zedeck
Rachel ZedeckBackpack Farm | KenyaKenya

Bruce... as I have mentioned before, we work with farmers in the field so our knowledge transfer flows in the opposite direction. Farming is done in the dirt, not a mobile phone.

Laura Drewett
Laura DrewettEsoko NetworksGhana

Agreed Rachel. 

At Esoko, we are a private company which ensures that we respond to the demand of our end users. If the content and technology we deliver to farmers isn't giving them the value they need, then they won't pay for the service anymore. We have to make sure that the information is accurate and provided in a format that is easy to understand. We are constantly checking with our users to make sure we are getting it right, and iterating the product and content based on their feedback. It is demand driven. 

So clearly the private sector (private companies) can point to users paying for a service as evidence that smallholders are using and/or benefiting from ICT-based advisory services.

This is the point specifically raised in forum question 4: "What evidence exists of smallholders using and/or benefiting from ICT-based advisory services?"

I encourage everyone to continue this disucssion under question 4.

cheers, Michael

Ed Dowding
Ed DowdingUnited Kingdom

Wow.. how to begin listing all of the ways ICT helps. From recording, measuring, comparing, researching, promoting, selling, broadcasting, communicating, collaborating, campaigning..  

We live in a digital and connected age. We are astonishingly priviledged and potent!

Aparajita Goyal
Aparajita GoyalWorld BankUnited States of America

Developing and disseminating simple low cost 2 min videos showing farmers utilizing a particular ag technology and sharing their experiences, can sometimes lead to powerful effects in terms of higher adoption rates. For instance, look at Digital Green's videos that are "produced by farmers, for farmers, and of farmers." However, it requires strong support of local agricultural extension officers to not only validate and disseminate these innovations widely to the community, but also provide ancillary support to sustain adoption.