Farmer

Farmer (280)

Synopsis: Domenii: Agribusiness: Agribusiness colaterale: Farming: Farmer:

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.#

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.

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,

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.

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,

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

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.

It should also save farmers and governments around the world significant amounts of money in the future.

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.

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

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

#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

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

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;

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.

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,

#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.

By nurturing watermelon seeds to maturity inside cube-shaped glass boxes Japanese farmers create cube-shaped mature melons that allow for densely-packed shipping and storage of the fruit.

He's planning to adapt his model to predict the movement of plant pathogens which could help farmers preemptively protect their crops by describing where to strategically deploy pesticides.

when the farmer selects his seeds. On the long term this will lead to worsen relation between the bees and the plants.

#Google Already Testing Delivery Robots In Australia In rural Australia a drone delivers dog treats to a farmer.

, farmers. Anaerobic digestion is considered also a less favored way of dealing with excess food. From an environmental standpoint, it's better to chop food up into deli salad,

But in Vietnam, thousands of farmers have turned to weaver ants to help them grow their cashews.

or deterring pests that the farmers'net income jumped 71%.%Curious whether weaver ants might be effective alternatives to pesticides in other situations

"the researchers think more farmers should make use of ant control. The idea of using weaver ants is not new

About 1700 years ago, Chinese farmers could buy ants on the market to release in citrus groves,

But now, two European companies are considering how to provide weaver ant nests to farmers,

and a Danish aid project is helping to establish ant nurseries in Africa so as to provide mature colonies to farmers interested in trying out these six-legged pest controllers.

unless we make oilseeds remunerative for farmers by increasing import duty, "he added. Massive imports have driven down Indian soybean prices by 20 per cent in four months, discouraging farmers from expanding oilseed area.

But despite this, local soyoil is still 50 per cent costlier than imported palm oil.""Oilseed cultivation is not profitable.

India has said it plans to spend $1. 5 billion over three years to help farmers grow oil palm trees.

It has already been considering directly buying oilseeds from farmers and boosting state support for rapeseed, soybeans and peanuts.

But as of now, it is a Catch-22 for farmers and millers.""We can't sell edible oils at higher prices due to cheaper imports

and oilseed farmers are not ready to accept lower prices, "said the miller Agrawal l

as precision ag company Farmers Edge, fresh off a Series B from Kleiner Perkins, announced the acquisition of Granduke Geomatics.

Farmers Edge seems to be taking a page out of Climate Corporation playbook, which made several acquisitions in 2014,

and under Byzantine water rights laws that date back to the 1820s there has been little incentive for farmers to manage this resource more sustainably.

It hardware/software solution enables farmers to analyze every drop of water on their property,

and has been on an acquisition spree itself with other Silicon valley startups like Farmers Edge following suit.

Using insecticides is one of the few ways farmers currently have to treat their groves for greening, also known as Huanglongbing or HLB.

"Shrimp farmers have been either legally or illegally cutting down mangroves. Farmed shrimps, or prawns, account for more than half of the global demand for the crustaceans.

Beginning with Scotland prohibition on domestic genetically modified crop cultivation on Aug 9, Europe scientists and farmers watched with mounting dismay as other countries followed suit.

Shielded from the winds of change behind a $50 billion wall of subsidies thanks to the European union Common agricultural policy, farmers in Europe can,

I was interrupted by an organic farmer who said he was determined never to grow biotech crops. His grounds?

Yet from drought tolerant maize to virus-resistant cassava, many biotech traits are being developed that could quickly improve the livelihoods of poorer African farmers.

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