The IBM Research, Brazil announced the AgroPad loT prototype that is AI-powered technology that will help farmers’ health check soil and water. This technology comes at a time when farmers have to send their soil and water samples to a lab for environmental and other chemical analysis. This is often expensive and time-consuming and in most cases out of reach for smallholder farmers. The advantage of empowering farmers with soil and water analysis is that they can perform environmental analysis on their farm and with the results they obtain make decisions that can help increase their crop...
FOSS4g2018 meeting will take place in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania from the 27th of August to the 2nd of September 2018 and there will be a large GIS community in attendance. In this light, CGIAR, IFPRI, WeRobotics and Tanzania Flying Labs are organising a "Drones for Agriculture" Knowledge Sharing Day on Friday 24th of August in Dar es Salaam. Interested persons within the agriculture are invited to sign-up. Places are limited to 50 participants. Participants will be chosen based on their application. The event is free of charge, however travel & lodging needs to be paid by participants...
This week is the 6th World Forest Week and it coincides with the 2th session of Food and Agriculture Organization’s Committee on Forestry (COFO) Undoubtedly the focus of this week is forests! The theme of this week is ‘ Forests and the Sustainable Development Goals –from aspiration to action ’ The major highlight of this week is launch of publication, The State of The World’s Forests: Forest Pathways to Sustainable Development, whose aim is to provide new information to help interlinkages and enhance the understanding of how policies on forests and trees help achieve SDG15 and also seeks to...
The regional conference seeks to help farmers and other value chain actors to harness the benefits of technology and data, and drive the adoption of these digital tools by farmers. It bring together end users, service providers, disseminators, regulators, policy formulators, and technology...
A recently published pre-print article details the usage of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) for environmental monitoring. While the article was written within the specific armpit of a project, it raises interesting issues on the use of drones for data collection, ecosystems and river monitoring. The usage of drones, UAVs or Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) continues to be widespread within agriculture. Drones are used in cropping, monitoring plants, pests control and many other areas including forest and environmental monitoring. A recently published pre-print article by a group of scholars...
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations is hosting the 2nd International Symposium on Agroecology : Scaling Up agroecology to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which is underway. The 2nd symposium has gathered around 400 policy-makers, practitioners, academics and public and private sector representatives to discuss policies and actions to support scaling up agroecology. The aim of the Second International Symposium is to identify needs and problems that countries face in the adoption and implementation of agroecology, to evaluate the impact of dedicated...
The Forum for the Future of Agriculture (FFA) has been contributing to the debate on agriculture and the environment in Brussels since 2008. The FFA is now firmly established as the premier event where agriculture and environment meet each year for an open dialogue This year the forum returns to...
In 2015, many countries adopted the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development , there by committing to a vision of a low- carbon, climate-resilient and sustainable future for all. The world events leading to and after the signing of the agreement have shown that climate issues are becoming a reality; for instance, 2016 was the hottest year on record with the average global temperature at almost 1 degrees celsius above pre-industrial levels. Under the Paris Agreement, countries have developed nationally determined contributions (NDCs), national adaptation plans and mid-...
Seeds and Chips recently published a piece by Marco Gualtieri who proposes that technology is combating climate change in African Agriculture. In Africa, due to climate induced changes the availability of fertile land shrinks and this has sparked rural to urban migration. Ballooning urban population has skewed allocation of funds to cities and support for farming is slashed even further with an impact of lowering food production. The article also notes that there is a need to find sustainable methods in food and rural agriculture; keeping young dedicated people on the ground and then...
The regional conference seeks to help farmers and other value chain actors to harness the benefits of technology and data, and drive the adoption of these digital tools by farmers. It bring together end users, service providers, disseminators, regulators, policy formulators, and technology...