The Somalia Water and Land Information Management project (SWALIM http://www.faoswalim.org ) is one of the few UN development programmes to have information management as its primary mission, using technologies such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and remote sensing mapping and data...
La Organización de las Naciones Unidas para la Agricultura y la Alimentación (FAO), el Centro para la Cooperación Agrícola y Rural (CTA) y la comunidad e-Agriculture están buscando casos que muestren buenas prácticas y prácticas promisorias en el uso de TICs para la agricultura . Esta llamada busca...
L’ Organisation des Nations Unies pour l’alimentation et l’agriculture (FAO), le Centre Technique pour la coopération agricole et rurale (CTA) et la communauté pratique e-Agriculture lancent un appel à propositions de bonnes pratiques et des pratiques prometteuses sur l’utilisation des TIC pour l’...
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) and the e-Agriculture Community of Practice (COP) launched a call for good and promising practices on the use of ICTs for Agriculture . The call aims at collecting...
SoilMapp is an app for iPad that lets users find out soil information such as how much water the soil holds, its clay content and acidity, among other attributes related to agricultural productivity and land management. The app enables users to view maps, photographs, satellite images, tables and graphs of data about nearby soils and learn about the soil’s physical and chemical characteristics (acidity, soil carbon, available water storage, salinity and erodibility). View this SoilMapp introductory video: Credits: CSIRO SoilMapp is designed for Australian farmers, consultants, planners,...
Abalobi, which is Xhosa name for fishermen, is as a mobile application for the small-scale fishermen to let them produce their own knowledge on fishing and build resilient communities in the face of climate change. There are currently 30,000 artisanal fishers along South Africa's coastline making their living from the sea and living on a thin line between commercial and subsistence fishing. The innovation of Abalobi is the fact that small-scale fishermen can record what they caught, when, where, using what method and how much they sold the fish for. All that information is stored in the app...
AQUASTAT is FAO's global information system on water and agriculture. It collects, analyses and disseminates data and information by country and by region. Its aim is to provide users interested in global, regional and national analyses with comprehensive information related to water resources and agricultural water management across the world, with emphasis on countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. AQUASTAT offers the user standardized data and tools to generate its own analysis. Ultimately, it aims to improve the user's understanding and monitoring of water resources,...
In a recent article on Harvard Business Review, Ndubuisi Ekekwe explores how digital technology is poised at providing a solution to increase farm productivity in Africa. In this article he reviews the food challenges affecting Africa such as weather changes, rural-urban migration that deprives farming communities of young people and deforestation amongst many challenges. While African governments have employed many policy instruments to improve farm productivity, yields are still marginally improving. The article notes that African entrepreneurs are interested in how farmers work and how...
The first beta release of the FAO Water Productivity through Open access of Remotely sensed derived data (WaPOR) portal is available as of 14 April 2017. The FAO portal monitors and reports on agriculture water productivity over Africa and the Near East. The portal provides open access to the water productivity database and allows for direct data queries, time series analyses, area statistics and data download of key variables associated to water and land productivity. The portal provides information on variables such as water productivity, land productivity, above ground biomass production,...
Agricultural work in mountainous areas such as grass cutting is done manually. Because of the many slopes it is difficult to introduce a robot. At the same time, there is a huge labour shortage in japanese agriculture as the rural population is aging and the young are not attracted by the agricultural sector. The Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries will work on the development of an unmanned mowing robot. The new unmanned vehicle is based on a passenger type mowing machine, but obviously much smaller. It has been miniaturized essentially by changing the power from engine...
