E-Agriculture

Webinar series on Farmers’ access to data

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Webinar series on Farmers’ access to data

GFAR recently announced a series of webinars on farmers' rights to data and this is a follow-up to the face-to-face course on Farmers Access to Data that was held in Centurion (Pretoria), South Africa in November 2017.


According to the GFAR website,the webinars will be co-convened together with GODAN and CTA and will be conducted by the very same trainers who so successfully handled the course in Centurion: Dan Berne, Stephen Kalyesubula, Nicolene Fourie and Anneliza Collett. 

The two webinars will be held on the 22 and 28 February at 4pm CET, and a recording of each respective webinar will be made available in March.

Webinar 1. Data-driven agriculture overview

Webinar overview

Precision agriculture is a promising set of technologies that is data intensive, but which has limited adoption by small holder farms in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Concurrently, current trends in sustainability, traceability, and compliance reporting demand that an ever-increasing amount of data be gathered as part of everyday operations in modern production agriculture.

The use of farm management information systems (FMIS) for decision support has shown great promise for improving farm yields and profitability. However, growers are often unsure of the value of the data that they are providing and/or receiving.

  • How does this data help them make the right decisions to improve their yield and profitability? How do growers and service providers work together to simplify the design and use of farm data?
  • How can smallholder farmers take advantage of data in a mutually valuable relationship with data providers?

Webinar Goals

Provide attendees a foundation for understanding the use of data for farming and across the agricultural value chain. Attendees should be able to apply the core concepts of using data for field operations, as well as how data is used across the value chain. Attendees will be introduced to the opportunities and challenges of using data, especially for smallholder farmers.

Registration Details

Thursday 22 February, 4pm CET
Duration: 1 hour, with 15 minutes for questions

Register here.

Speaker

Dan Berne - Project Manager on AgGateway's Precision Ag Irrigation Language data standards project.

Webinar 2. Key data for farmers

Webinar Overview

Data becomes significant if it can be linked to information, knowledge and wisdom. Once processed it can be used to generate detailed insights into farm operations and the environment. 

It assists big and small holder farmers in making data-based operational decisions to optimize yield and boost revenue while minimizing expenses, the chances of crop failure, and environmental impact.

For data driven agriculture to happen we have to distinguish the data streams in the food chain from pre-planting to consumption, for example: data collected and managed from the farm by farmers which can be either static or dynamic; data coming from external sources like market prices and data that is exported for aggregation by other farm service providers.

However, farmers may not be in a position to realize those streams and possibly what data and information is required to answer the food chain questions, for example: What produce can I grow where I live? When should I sow/plant/harvest/market it? How should I sow/plant/harvest/market it? All these questions can be answered if the factual data or information is used or made available to the farmers.

Registration details

Wednesday 28 February, 4pm CET
Duration: 1 hour, with 15 minutes for questions

Register here

Speaker

Stephen Kalyesubula is a Computer Engineering and an agri-preneur from Makerere University.

The source of all the above information is GFAR Website

More information here