Contribution received through the e-Agriculture platform
Question 1
The land holdings in developing countries like India is very small. Networking of small holding farmers to increase the acreage as single large piece of land by FPO's & NGO's is essential. Government should focus on it to develop Digital Agriculture.
Latest technologies which are suitable for the small farm lands are Drones & Robots .These technologies should be promoted and utilized.
There should be a separate individual policy to encourage Digital agriculture by the Governments and it should be govern by agriculture research institutions, agriculture machinery manufactures, progressive farmers.
Government should allocate sufficient funds to develop innovative technologies which are suitable to small & Marginal farmers.
In order to reduce Suicidal deaths in the farming sector, the government should provide farm inputs, machinery, loans at lower interest rates with minimal documentation and also provide minimum support price by establishing digital agri markets and make sure that digital markets are implementing without fail. The Digital markets to be audited for fair practices.
Question 2
Arrange to transfer upgraded technologies from the developed countries.
Support & facilitate the strong bi-lateral relationships between the countries where technologies are available to suit the local conditions.
Assist and provide required funds/financial assistance to the research institutes, universities, progressive farmers who are involved in adopting precision agriculture to scale up the digital agriculture.
Assist in setting up agricultural advanced technological parks to train progressive farmers and early adopters.
Boosting up research and development activities in universities & farm mechanise industries along with popularisation of inexpensive technical tools among small scale farmers to increase the profit.
Adopt low, medium and High technology in digital agriculture in steo wise.
Question 3
Aggregation of existing research and resources: to be reviewed to implement at the developing nations.
Highlights of new technologies: technologies which are used in NASA (e.g.: LIBS) remote sensing technologies to be examined and adopted in digital agriculture.
A synthesis of the way that target farmers can progress in implementing various digital technologies: The new innovative technologies should be developed based on the domestic conditions, crops, livestock, poultry, weather pattern.
How to guide for officials or small holder farmers for business model development and technology: the council should provide digital agri service providers to train the farmers and digital agri tools providers on lease /rental to adopt new technologies.
Question 4
Success stories on digital agriculture around the developing countries to be filmed and shown to small and marginal farmers to adopt and scale up the digital agriculture.
The above suggestion may be included in working group.
Question 5
Digital Agriculture Benefits for small & Marginal farmers:
The rapid economic changes in developing countries are creating new scopes for digital agriculture. Previously the agriculture is resource based nature and now it is entering in to knowledge based era.
Due to increase in population, availability of land diminishing, the small scale farmers’ productivity required to be increased. To organize the total system of agriculture towards a low input, high efficiency and sustainable agriculture we need to modify the available innovative technology to suit domestic conditions, crop type, weather pattern.
Since the digital technology difficult to understand small & marginal farmers, we need to provide training and service providers and Digital agriculture tools to be provided at affordable cost by Government or Corporate sectors.
Adoption of Digital Agriculture will help in
Increase in farm production and Profit.
It will provide better decision support system (DSS).
It will improve soil productivity.
It will improve water quality.
It will improve wildlife habit.
sustain natural resources for generations to come.
it will helps us in protecting the environment.
This digital agriculture tools helps farmers to complete their tasks in reduced working hours and lowers production costs.
Digital Agriculture makes farming more interesting for future generations.
Gullapalli Koteswara Rao