On the 17th of October 2018, CABI announced the PestSmart Diagnostics e-Learning course. The course is part of CABI PestSmart Diagnostic package , designed to help plant health practitioners and students to develop and improve their ability to recognize plant symptoms, relate them to causes and to identify what is causing the problem. The e-Learning course is derived from the Plantwise programme and the course is unique in two ways. It is the first plant health e-learning product and secondly, it is a rare example of a proven innovation developed from an aid sector into a commercial product...
Collecting data in the field has always been a headache for researchers, students, aid projects, and international organizations alike. Thanks to technology, we can now collect data through using mobile technology and replace the traditional approaches. Despite the advances in technology, haphazardly collected data tends to be a headache to analyse. In order to support the use of mobile phones and other handheld devices, US Global Development Lab and their partners have published the “ Paper-to-Mobile Data Collection” manual. Paper-to-Mobile Data Collection: A manual This manual was designed...
by Olaitan Ogunnote & Raimot Adewunmi - Undergraduate Research Assistants, ECV Ontario, SEDRD, University of Guelph Introduction While we might not yet be able to live on our red monochromatic, moon-like planetary counterpart, Mars, we could make our stay on the bright bluish-green Earth with hints of white, a little bit longer and more enjoyable through technology. Particularly, through technology that makes the world less hungry and the environment more conducive, in other words, more food sovereign . Therefore, what does this world of food sovereignty look like and how can technology...
Access to Agriculture (a video platform with agricultural videos) won the ‘Digital for Development’ Prize. Access Agriculture was selected as the winner of ‘iStandOut’ category at the biannual Prize Digital for Development (D4D). Access to Agriculture seeks to promote innovations in sustainable agriculture and rural enterprises through capacity development and South-South exchange through farmer-to-farmer video trainings. In many countries, farmers use local languages (and cannot speak English, French or Spanish). Access agriculture has trained local partners to translate videos into their...
This conference is being collaboratively organized by AFITA, INFITA, and INSAIT with the aim to coalesce the 'Research Frontiers in Precision Agriculture' for sharing the recent advances in Remote Sensing & GIS, ICTs, IoAgT, sensor networks, image processing, robotics, machine learning, big...
The FAO e-Agriculture and Harvesting are inviting interested persons to attend the following webinar to be presented on the 25th of October 2018 at 16:00 (CEST) Rome Time [ Convert your time ] To attend kindly register here to receive attendance information and also to get the details of the recording after the event. Webinar details Title : Driving Financial Inclusion for Smallholder Farmers by Leveraging Satellite Data and Machine Learning Abstract There are an estimated 500 million smallholder farmers in the world. Only 7% have access to financing for inputs like improve seeds, fertilizer...
An interesting article appeared in The Guardian and reports that Dutch scientists say they can create millions of bee-like drones to take over if the insects die out. This comes at a timely moment when bees and other pollinators are reported to be under threat. In a recent report the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations noted that “present species extinction rates are 100 to 1 000 times higher than normal due to human impacts”. The solution of robotic bees by scientists at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands is an example of using ICTs to tackle world’s...
The GSMA today announced a new Innovative Fund for Rural Connectivity seeking to expand digital inclusion in Ghana and Uganda. The Fund will provide grants up to £300,000 and is open to eligible companies who can deploy solutions in Uganda or Ghana and is implemented in partnership with MTN Uganda and Vodafone Ghana respectively. Projects eligible for funding should employ innovative ways to deploy mobile broadband networks in rural areas with partnerships with a mobile operator and projects should be commercially viable and scalable in similar environments. The Innovation Fund for Rural...
The World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit is an international networking and deal-making event for global agribusinesses, solution providers, entrepreneurs and investors. The goal of the summit is to accelerate the commercialization of advanced agricultural technologies by generating global...
Thomson Reuters Foundation profiles young farmers who have stayed on the farms despite a drift of young people from farming in Africa. According to the African Development Bank , Africa has the world’s youngest population with 60% of its 1.2 billion people under 25. Yet Africa’s young people are off the farms. There is hope that technology such as mobile telephony – where Africa penetration rates remain high – could be a rallying point to bring young farmers back to the fields. Meanwhile, developed nations turn to robots, blockchain, artificial intelligence and machine learning to solve...
This conference is being collaboratively organized by AFITA, INFITA, and INSAIT with the aim to coalesce the 'Research Frontiers in Precision Agriculture' for sharing the recent advances in Remote Sensing & GIS, ICTs, IoAgT, sensor networks, image processing, robotics, machine learning, big...
The World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit is an international networking and deal-making event for global agribusinesses, solution providers, entrepreneurs and investors. The goal of the summit is to accelerate the commercialization of advanced agricultural technologies by generating global...