Agriculture

Ashoka Tech writes about a pilot project providing SMS information to farmers in Chile about weather, news updates and crop prices:

COOPEUMO, a grassroots farmer’s cooperative with more than 350 small scale farmers as members provides a number of services to farmers such as technical assistance, credit and training. Last year COOPEUMO started a pilot project called DatAgro to provide SMS based information to farmers. The service started in April, 2009 has been supported by DataDyne, Federation of Agrarian Innovation, UNESCO, Entel PCS and two Chilean newspapers- El Mostrador and El Mercurio.

By providing information related to supply and product prices, climate conditions, and international markets; the initiative allows small scale farmers to align with the market needs. Thanks to the proliferation of mobile phones, farmers today have access to such information. ‘Last week I received one (message) about the weather so I didn’t plant anything because of the information I received and I planted yesterday, after the rain had stopped’ says Hugo Tobar, a farmer. Ninety percent of adults in rural areas of Chile have mobile phones. Farmers today consider mobile phones as a necessity and not a luxury.

At the heart of this initiative is the Mobile Information Platform (MIP), a technology developed by DataDyne. MIP is a platform to broadcast SMS based information to mobile phones. MIP works on the most basic mobile phones and on less-than-GPRS networks. The added advantage of MIP is that farmers can also subscribe to RSS feeds from interesting and useful internet sources by sending simple SMS text commands.

Read the full post here.

According to Chris Combs from National Geographic News, Elizabeth Greene -- an MBA student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management -- has founded the MIT Food and Agriculture Collaborative, an inter-disciplinary group of students, faculty, and staff whose research and interests lie in developing interactive tools to facilitate healthier food and agricultural systems. As part of the Collaborative, Greene is trying to disaggregate the information supply chain about farming in order to help consumers learn the "full story" behind the foods they eat, while helping farmers better understand consumer needs. To do so, Greene hopes to leverage Internet and mobile technologies to enable farmers to tag their produce with information about how that produce was grown, fertilized, watered and stored, as well as how that produce was distributed and delivered to grocery stores. In this way, Greene hopes to help consumers obtain more information about the food they eat, rather than the currently simple binary information about whether the food was organic or not, healthy or not, etc. Of course, all of this information is already available to farmers but somehow gets lost in the world’s massive food distribution system until in the end consumers know little to nothing about the food they eat.