SciDevNet published an article supported by the Technical Centre for Agriculture and Rural Cooperation (CTA). The article focuses on the various apps that are available in agriculture as curated by the Apps4Ag database . The example of Farmerline app is highlighted; this app gives smallholder farmers voice-based messages in their local langauges. Through this service farmers can get price related information; the use of insecticides and weather information. Other cited in the article that are popular in agriculture include the iCow – cattle information services in Kenya; Mrittikā – weather...
What has ICTs to do with climate change? Malcolm Johnson the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Deputy Secretary General, answers this question in the published news items coinciding with the COP23 that was discussing The Paris Agreement . He positions ICTs as a solution to the current world climate challenges. These include the (i) reported increase in the concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, (ii) extreme weather induced events happening with increasing frequency. These disasters are estimated to have cost the global economy $520 billion a year and have pushed more...
Africa’s economy is based largely agriculture and most of them being smallholder farmers. One of the challenges these family farmers face is access to weather information and forecasting services. Lack of access to relevant weather information is due to lack of access of weather source information, dilapidated weather stations that fail to accurately provide reliable weather data, amongst many other reasons. Kukua is an initiative whose vision is to close Africa’s weather information gap by providing new weather station technology and improved weather forecast accuracy. Kukua seeks to...
From 16 to 27 October, e-Agriculture Team organized the “introduction to drones in agriculture’ learning activity . This self-learning activity is intended to increase the appreciation of and knowledge on the use of drones in agriculture and rural development to members and followers of the e-Agriculture Community of Practice (CoP). During the second week of the activity participants reviewed academic literature on drones, including the ongoing research from Catheline Pieters on the monitoring of orchards using drones. The participants also had the opportunity to present their work during a...
SatSure is a data analytics company which integrates satellite, weather, and IoT analytics with the agriculture sector in order to help farmer's financial security and crop insurance. India is facing severe consequences due to climate change, such as droughts and floods. In the agricultural sector many insurance companies fail to provide the farmers with fair and timely compensation for losses incurred. There is also a lack of transparency in fixing the fair price for the produce. According to 33-year-old Abhishek Raju, founder of SatSure, technology must be used to mitigate both farm and...
Collect Earth is a free and open source software for land monitoring developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) . The software is part of the set of tools called Open Foris , and was developed with Google Earth , Bing Maps and Google Earth Engine . Collect Earth is designed so that users can analyze high and very high resolution satellite imagery for different purposes, including: Support multi-phase National Forest Inventories Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) assessments Monitoring agricultural land and urban areas Validation of existing...
Global Forest Watch (GFW) is an interactive online forest monitoring and alert system designed for users to access the information they need to better manage and conserve forest landscapes. The mission of the Global Forest Watch is to provide the most precise information about the status of forest landscapes worldwide. GFW works in collaboration with NASA , Google and the University of Maryland to collect data on forest change which is displayed on an interactive map. Watch this introductory video by the Global Forest Watch: GFW is free and enables users to work with a wide variety of tools,...
The PRISE (Pest Risk Information Service) project forecasts pest outbreaks based on earth observation providing risk forecasts and early warnings in order for smallholders to take action and avoid crop losses. The project has been awarded £6.38 million (or 7,9 million USD) in funding over five years by the UK Space Agency . CABI CEO, Dr Trevor Nicholls, said, “An estimated 40 per cent of the world’s crops are lost to pests. This impacts the ability of smallholders living in poor rural communities to feed their families." The project will also be based on Plantwise, a CABI program combining a...
In order to enhance its capacity to observe large swathes of territory on a regular basis, as well as viewing otherwise inaccessible areas, SWALIM developed a remote monitoring system using remotely sensed data. Remote Sensing (RS) is the ability to capture and analyse information from the earth’s surface from a distance. The system was developed in large part to address the issue of lack of access due to insecurity. The initial objective was to ensure accountability for FAO’s programme beneficiaries after the 2011 famine, following which FAO provided cash to communities in return for...
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Global Drylands Assessment is a thematic study based on the visual interpretation of satellite images in publicly available repositories (such as Google Earth Engine and Bing Maps ) focusing on drylands. Results are reported at the global and regional levels. More than 200 experts with knowledge on land uses in specific dryland regions conducted the interpretation using the Open Foris software tool Collect Earth. Collect Earth communicates with Google Earth Engine to facilitate access to freely available satellite images from...
