| Agronomy (16) |  |
| Farming (316) | |
| Greenhouse (46) | |
| Plantation (5) | |
| Agronomy (16) | |
| Farming (316) | |
| Greenhouse (46) | |
| Plantation (5) | |
and competing with farmers. ou first need to look at: are there enough potatoes to eat?
Then, are we not competing with farmers making income from selling potatoes? he explains. o
Smallholder farmers produced around 10 million tonnes of potatoes this year, yet around 10-20%were lost in postharvest waste due to lack of access to markets, poor storage conditions,
From fields to global tech hub The farmers'children in dusty Darbaripur no longer want to work the land.
and farmers settle down to their traditional clay hookahs. There's very little left of their ancestral village.
Karan Singh is a 47-year-old farmer whose life#like the other farmers in his village#used to depend on erratic monsoons.
Then property prices soared. He sold his farmland and became an overnight millionaire.""There are no farms left here for us to remain farmers,
#he says.""Our hope is that our future generation will also be employed as software engineers in the offices that have sprung up here.
Small, rural tea farmers in Kenya, for example, complain that unscrupulous buyers routinely under-weigh their produce by 10-20%.
electronic scales are used to transmit the weight of produce via Bluetooth to a mobile phone which records this in farmers'accounts on a cloud-based server.
farmers would get conned on the weight, #says Virtual city chief executive John Waibochi.""Buyers would tamper with the weight scale.#
#Going digital and printing receipts"cuts out fraud#and increases the value to farmers 9-13%,#he adds.#
#Tech fix for Africa's big farming challenge Africa could help feed the world if its farmland was utilised properly.
and that of the farmers he wanted to serve, cut straight to the heart of one of Sub-saharan africa deepest challenges
And of the 20%that is, the majority is owned by poor smallholder farmers with just one or two hectares of land,
and incomes that developed world farmers perhaps take for granted: credit; seeds; fertiliser; information on weather and market prices;
which hopes to boost smallholder productivity by providing farmers with high-quality products, services, and information.
The company is also offering to help farmers actually figure out what they need to improve their harvest.
With their new soil-testing service, Farm Shop agents can collect soil samples from farmers,
and within a few days send results directly to the farmers via SMS, informing them what will help improve yields.
a farmer can then go to the shop and purchase more fertiliser, or get the right kind for
o individual solution can solve the problems for rural farmers in Africa. It an ecosystem that needs to be built.
Several innovations like Farm Shop are improving the lives and income of Africa struggling smallholder farmers,
For the past few years, social enterprise Kilimo Salama has been piloting a crop insurance scheme for smallholder farmers
But, it become a highly valuable tool for helping farmers secure much-needed credit from banks.
Traditionally, farmers try to reduce their exposure to risks like crop failure (from bad rains or crop parasites) by minimising their investment in farming inputs.
As a consequence, farmers remain trapped in a cycle of low agricultural productivity and poverty. If the rains fail,
which farmers can buy into at the beginning of the season, for typically around 10-20%of the amount they invest in seeds and inputs.
Kilimo Salama then works with agronomists to calculate the index and find where the rain was too much, too little,
Farmer payouts are calculated automatically based on their crops, location, and number of seeds purchased. By coupling bank loans with Kilimo Salama insurance scheme, the organisation has enabled banks
making access to essential credit easier for farmers. e not just selling insurance, says Goslinga,
ee enabling farmers to get a harvest. As of this year, Kilimo Salama has insured over 100,000 smallholder farmers across Kenya and Rwanda.
One SMS at a time Yet even if farmers have a great harvest that doesn mean it easy for them to sell their produce.
Calestous Juma, Harvard Professor and author of The New Harvest; Agricultural innovation in Africa claims that the greatest failure of Africa agricultural sector is the absence of investment in rural infrastructure. arkets cannot function
In a nutshell, the problem is many of Africa rural farmers can get their produce to the markets in time, because of bad roads, lack of communication,
farmers in other parts of the country were driven either by swindling middlemen to sell cabbage at nearly a tenth of the price,
%Through a simple text message, MFARM allows rural farmers in remote areas of Kenya to check the latest market prices,
and band together with other farmers in their area to make bulk purchases of expensive but needed agricultural inputs like seeds,
farmers were being exploited by middlemen, claims Adrian Mukhebi, Chairman of the Kenya Agricultural Commodities exchange (KACE.
ow, with information via mobiles, farmers are better able to bargain prices against middlemen, and can in some cases increase 25-35%of their profits.
Technology role in improving access for farmers may be exciting and hold great potential, Mukhebi claims,
but as these tools and information are not yet available to all farmers it still has some way to go.
#California Unveils Strictest Rules on Pesticide California farmers now must abide by the nation's strictest rules for a widely used pesticide in a change designed to protect farmworkers
Costs are sure to rise for farmers, who will pass it along to consumers, but Leahy said it is worth it."
"Under the new regulation, farmers are limited to applying the pesticide on up to 40 acres in one day, a reduction of 75 percent.
Farmers who use upgraded tarps to cover their fields while applying the pesticide can follow less stringent regulations,
Farmers use about 5 million pounds of the pesticide a year, most heavily in the Central Valley counties of San Joaquin and Fresno and along the coast in Monterey, Santa barbara, Santa cruz and Ventura counties.
California farmers fear that tighter restrictions will increase the costs of their fruits and vegetables,
"Farmers and their families live near their farms and work in their fields and care deeply about protecting the safety of their workers, neighbors and communities,
and the grocery store in the months ahead since everything from transportation to manufacturing to our petroleum-intensive agricultural system is a puppet flailing upon the strings of this volatile commodity.
That is what a European union (EU) research project has achieved offering hope for farmers battling the broomrape one of nature's parasites.
Tóth says he expects the applications will be picked up by farmers across Europe suffering from broomrapes.
Farmers struggle to control the broomrape, whose scaly flower shoots produce millions of dust-size seeds that are dispersed easily, and long-lived.
By contrast, the antibodies produced by PHARMA-PLANTA were derived from tobacco plants grown in greenhouses in Germany,
And it not just the occasional flower buyer who needs guidance on watering as even experienced farmers can misjudge how much to sprinkle on their crops,
Even in Europe, farmers still suffer during droughts, and the Mediterranean region, with its limited, fragile and unevenly distributed water resources is especially vulnerable:
Aided by a grant of#1. 14 million from the European commission, the Waterbee Demonstration Action project which gathered ten European partners over two years-brings the innovations together to help farmers irrigate where
and when they need. e wanted to build something that is easy for farmers to use
so we can imagine it being used by farmers, growers, hotels, golf clubs, and even domestic homeowners, says Olaherty. t the same time,
and plant sciences department. f a population from the blue soup region mixes with a population from the red soup region their offsprings would appear as a purple soup. he more genetic admixture that takes place,
As more gardeners and farmers add ground charcoal or biochar to soil to both boost crop yields and counter global climate change the study offers the first detailed explanation for this mystery. nderstanding the controls on water movement through biochar-amended soils is critical
and the transcriptional network work could allow scientists to breed plants that are better able to deal with stressful environments#crucial in a world where farmers attempt to feed an increasing population amid urban development of arable land
Today legal poppy farming is restricted to a few countries including Australia France Hungary India Spain and Turkey supervised by the International Narcotics Control board
and chair of the school of plant sciences with a joint appointment in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology. ice will play a key role in helping to solve what we call the 9 billion-people question. he 9 billion people question refers to predictions that the world
Much of the evolutionary analysis of the genome was performed by plant sciences doctoral candidate Muhua Wang and by Carlos Machado of the University of Maryland.
Wing is also working with Quifa Zhang from Huazhong Agricultural University in Wuhan China to create a set of super-crop science
the team also is conducting research on how it can make good financial sense for farmers.
#Gene keeps wheat from sprouting on the stalk A new way to keep high humidity from damaging wheat crops could save farmers millions of dollars
This phenomenon pre-harvest sprouting or PHS has such important economic repercussions for farmers around the world that scientists have been working on finding a solution to the problem for decades.
A team of researchers led by Professor Jaswinder Singh of Mcgill University s Department of Plant science has identified a key gene that acts as a switch to determine how a particular plant will respond to high humidity
It should also save farmers and governments around the world significant amounts of money in the future.
The researchers studied Arabidopsis thaliana often used as a model subject in plant science studies and found the protein binds to specific regions of cellulose microfibrils the long parallel chains of cellulose that make up plant cell walls.
and around crops could pay huge dividends for farmers in the near future thanks to advances in genetic sequencing.
Reaching those goals would drastically cut input costs for farmers and produce a range of environmental benefits.
Additional researchers from UC Davis Department of Plant sciences the USDA-ARS Cereal Disease Laboratory and Kansas State university also contributed to the study.
Agronomists sometimes try to crossbreed species such as barley and wheat in hopes of creating new crops.
Since 1996 farmers worldwide have planted more than 1 billion acres (400 million hectares) of genetically modified corn and cotton that produce insecticidal proteins from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis or Bt for short.
Bt proteins used for decades in sprays by organic farmers kill some devastating pests but are considered environmentally friendly and harmless to people.
Three of the five cases are in the United states where farmers have planted about half of the world s Bt crop acreage.
#But will farmers ever be able to prevent resistance altogether? Tabashnik says he doesn t think so.#
If cow milking recalls a bucolic image of a farmer strolling out to the barn with a bucket and stool,
With this robotic milker, the farmer needn't come any closer to the action than a readout on a smartphone,
so something more was needed to ease the life of the farmer. Robotic milking is based on the idea that
The Astronaut 4 is one of a range of robotic farming systems made by Lely, including robotic cowshed cleaners and forage pushers.
and works on the principle that instead of the farmer or the robot controlling the milking,
Levy even claims that the cows learn how to use the system faster than the farmers do.
As for the farmer, aside from filling the hoppers, collecting the milk and maintenance, most of the work is supervising the system by means of a remote dashboard on a computer
It may be more Bill gates than Farmer Giles, but at least the cows always get milked on time
#FLOW-AID helps farmers save water without sacrificing yields Wee already seen gadgets such as Koubachi and Flower power,
It designed to let farmers in drought-stricken regions know when and how much water to apply to their crops,
Multiple devices are installed at key locations in a farmer field. Each device incorporates an aboveground control/communications unit,
a farmer can access their network of FLOW-AIDS over the internet, to check the moisture
it can additionally advise users on how often fertilizer should be applied this stops farmers from wasting money by over-fertilizing,
#Ethiopia Agriculture ministry rolls out specialized phone service for farmers The Ethiopian government has rolled out a new phone service that farmers can call to get information on crops in their native languages.
crop failure or pestilence remains a stubborn problem for farmers and for wider regional food security. One issue for small hold farmers in the developing world is access to information and according to the United Nation development and humanitarian news website, IRIN,
African farmers often have less access to technical knowhow than those in other nations, which is one reason why the continent tends to produce less food despite its natural resources.
Populous Ethiopia has one of the fastest growing GDPS on the continent after years of famine and civil war.
but generally it means the educating farmers on how to apply scientific research and new farming methods.
Farmers can request targeted information via SMS or Interactive Voice Response. The project, still in its pilot phase, began in July
and according to a government source has had already calls from some three million farmers. It is run
"Farmers can'pull'practical, real-time advice available in their regional language by calling 8028 as often as they like,
when farmers first register to use the system.""Given the dozens of languages spoken, targeted information remains important,
Getting targeted information to farmers is a growing concern. In Colombia big data has been helping farmers with targeted information on
whether or not to plant crops, and when. Those who took the advice saved some $3. 8 million collectively i
Even during America recent urban renaissance streetcars, apartment buildings and farmers markets, oh my! the centrifugal force in job growth has reversed not.
They can even contact the farmer, if they feel moved. A provision of the federal food safety law passed last year requires that all players in the country food supply chain be able to quickly trace from
and other information the farmer chooses to share, such as the harvest date. here been a very rapid sea change in consumer behavior,
but it also allows the consumer to send a comment to the farmer, Grant said. ou can click a button
and tell the farmer hese are the greatest strawberries Ie ever hador whatever...It about using technology to put people back in touch with the people who grow their food.
That new for Phillip Bauman, a 42-year-old watermelon farmer in Washington state. Bauman bought the Harvestmark system for his Pasco farm about three years ago
Submissions ranged from self-filling water bottles, to extreme dehumidification, to a large-scale water sources for greenhouse drip irrigation, to emergency water for lifeboats, to self-filling canteens for the military,
#Precision agriculture moves farmers into the high tech age The U s. has seen record-setting drought in recent years.
So, the The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has joined forces with America beer brewers to change how farmer irrigate their crops.
the convergence of digital technology that allows farmers to apply just the right amount of fertilizer and water on their fields.
farmers can use precisely the right amount of resources on every square foot of a field.
what good for the farmer is good for the environment, writes Lisa Park, a spokeswoman for TNC.
The Conservancy first started working with farmers in Georgia while trying to protect freshwater mussels in the Flint River.
In Idaho, the nonprofit is collaborating with Millercoors to support farmers who upgrade their irrigation systems to new precision agriculture systems.
Farmers have begun installing new sprinklers nozzles, and computer-controlled irrigation covering thousands of acres that conserve millions of gallons of water each day. s a brewer, we know that the area we can have the biggest impact in reducing water usage is within the agricultural supply chain,
Farmers and the environment profit. Yet the central technology in this effortariable rate irrigation (VRI) asn a commercial endeavor delivered directly to farmers clamoring for the technology.
It took almost a decade of academic research before an unusual alliance of NGOS and local and state government agencies sought to commercialize the VRI technology in the private sector.
A successful grant-funded pilot project caught on among other farmers who are now applying it across acres in a dozen states,
(or dying) and the new farmers are looking for new and better ways of doing things
They can use greenhouses in order to take advantage of the sun s energy, or grow indoors with the help of artificial lights.
It takes advantage of the vertical space of city buildings rather than turning over wide expanses of land to agriculture and uses advanced greenhouse technology:
Singapore has taken local urban farming to a high level Skygreens has built the world s first commercial vertical farm in large three-story greenhouses, providing a sustainable source of fresh vegetables.
Considerable energy is required to power a closed, indoor greenhouse facility s artificial lighting, heating and cooling
and wind turbines with greenhouses to provide self-generated renewable electricity on-site. But the single technology that will be key to making vertical farms possible is lighting.
There is potential for these multifunctional techno-greenhouses built around LED grow lights to increase the quality of the food we eat
Farmers can be terrible managers, so it is no surprise that they are nervous about a new idea called prescriptive planting,
It also plunges stick-in-the-mud farmers into an unfamiliar world of ig dataand privacy battles. Monsanto prescriptive planting system, Fieldscripts, had its first trials last year
It is as if a farmer can know each of his plants by name. Prescriptive planting is catching on fast.
to beam advice on seeds and fertilisers to farmers in the field. A farm-supply cooperative
Farmers who have tried Monsanto system say it has pushed up yields by roughly 5%over two years,
The seed companies think providing more data to farmers could increase America maize yield from 160 bushels an acre (10 tonnes a hectare) to 200 bushelsiving a terrific boost to growersmeagre margins.
Farmers might be expected to have mixed feelings about the technology anyway: although it boosts yields, it reduces the role of discretion and skill in farmingheir core competence.
However, the bigger problem is that farmers distrust the companies peddling this new method. They fear that the stream of detailed data they are providing on their harvests might be misused.
or leak to rival farmers; the prescriptive planting firms might even use the data to buy underperforming farms
and run them in competition with the farmers; or the companies could use the highly sensitive data on harvests to trade on the commodity markets,
to the detriment of farmers who sell into those markets. Looking a gift horse in the mouth In response to such worries, the American Farm Bureau,
the country largest organisation of farmers and ranchers, is drawing up a code of conduct, saying that farmers own
and control their data; that companies may not use the information except for the purpose for
though so far their contracts with farmers do not always embody them. Also, once data have been sent and anonymised,
farmers might be said no longer to own them, so it is not clear what rights to them they still have.
For this reason and others, some Texan farmers have banded together to form the Grower Information Services Cooperative,
since the companies have not yet made the data fully ortable farmers may become locked into doing business with a single provider.
the Climate Corporation has set up a free data storage service for farmers, which others cannot access without the farmerspermission.
But its success depends on service providers persuading users (farmers or patients) to trust them. If the users think they are taking a disproportionate share of the risks
But this isn just a greenhouse: Toshiba plant factory will be a high-tech facility. Itl include optimized lights set to a wavelength to grow perfect plants
With satellite imagery and advanced sensors, farmers can optimize returns on inputs while preserving resources at ever larger scales.
or figuring out whether the fruit at the farmer market is ripe. Consumer Physics will offer both Android and iphone apps,
Farmers planting crops that can't be sold doesn't sound like a sensible proposition does it?
But it turns out that an increasing number of farmers are doing just that: buying planting and tending to so-called cover crops.
No farmers can't sell cover crops but they do reap benefits from them including increased yields of cash crops like corn and soybeans.
Now a new survey of commercial farmers has confirmed that cover crops increase yields in corn and soybeans the most common crops in the U s. Moreover cover crops were especially effective under drought conditions.
The North Central Sustainable agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program and the Conservation Technology Information center conducted the survey of more than 759 commercial farmers from winter 2012 through spring 2013.
Farmers who responded reported average increases of 11.1 bushels of corn per acre and 4. 9 bushels of soybeans per acre over prior harvests.
The farmers responding to the survey grew cover crops on an estimated 218000 acres in 36 states mostly in the Mississippi river basin.
Farmers enjoyed better corn yields after cover crops in all but one of the states hardest hit by the drought.
Farmers expected to pay for the ecosystem services provided by cover crops and were willing to pay median costs of $25 an acre to purchase seeds and $15 an acre for cover-crop establishment (aerial distribution of seed and the eventual killing of the plants at the end of the growing season).
Farmers interested in cover crops need to decide which species to use how and when to plant them
Despite the challenges the surveyed farmers had increased steadily their use of cover crops over the last decade.
which uses extensive data from a farmer's field and the surrounding region to help predict weather conditions
Precision agriculture can help farmers from Brunei to Brazil pinpoint the best time for harvesting to mitigate crop damage and loss;
Those and other smarter farming methods including techniques used early in the growing cycle are reducing weather-related crop damage by as much as 25 percent in some areas ensuring that fewer crops are wasted
In practical terms a farmer armed with precise weather forecasting information may choose to hold off on fertilizing an area of a farm expecting heavy rains;
and predicting of weather effects on transportation networks can help farmers make better decisions about which routes and methods will be fastest to transport harvested food.
Coupling predictive analytics and modeling techniques with other sophisticated farming methods can prove to be quite beneficial
For instance many farmers are now using methods like flow-through irrigation drip irrigation micro-sprinklers and more efficient use of groundwater to increase yields.
While the days of farmers using the divining rod to find water are passed long since many farmers especially in developing countries still rely too much on guesswork in making planting irrigation and harvesting decisions.
By combining supercomputing and Big data analytics with other technological innovations even farmers with modest means can bolster production and profits.
and properties of the soil, helping farmers and policymakers to improve degraded soils and increase crop production.
A farmer in Malawi, for instance, could use the map which will be freely available online to find out how much fertilizer,
It will be 6-8 years before the vaccine is available to farmers, they estimate. But if the method used to create the vaccine proves successful when scaled to commercial production,
and creating awareness about sustainable farming and improved water systems. Besides encouraging the development of locally useful technologies the program aims to improve the teaching of math and science.
#Products of progress Back in 2009, alumna Jodie Wu 9 launched Global Cycle Solutions (GCS) in Tanzania to bring small-scale farmers an innovative product she designed in MIT D-Lab:
cast-iron sheller allowed farmers to process their corn 10 times faster in one day, as opposed to weeks when done by hand.
By 2011, GCS had sold shellers to more than 1, 000 farmers. But its products still weren moving fast enough to fund product development, marketing, and sales.
As most are farmers, she adds, the $6 in margin they earn from selling a single lamp during non-harvest months is feed enough to their family for a few days. t really about creating a win-win-win situation,
when she learned about the plight of 500 million small-scale farmers around the world still using only their hands and hoes for farming.
To shell corn, these farmers traditionally fill bags with cobs and beat them to loosen the kernels,
As part of the class, Wu traveled to Tanzania to introduce farmers to a pedal-powered sheller developed by a Guatemalan organization called Mayapedal.
Farmers need only change a sprocket on the wheel and gears on the upper part of the bike to attach
Now not only could farmers process all their maize in one day, but they also retained their bikes for other uses.
With a majority of farmers still threshing by hand Wu says, his could potentially transform the industry.
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