What is e-Agriculture Strategy?
An e-Agriculture strategy is using innovative digital technology solutions like precision agriculture, drones, big data, predictive analytics, and blockchain to improve social and economic outcomes for smallholder farmers.
e-Agriculture programs aim to increase food security by helping smallholder farmers improve modern ICT4Ag farming methods and access to markets. Agricultural ICT4D strategies encompass the full agricultural value chain and includes adjacent technologies like digital financial services and geographic information systems.
Communication in Agriculture
Smallholder farmers have limited knowledge, services, and technologies available to them. They typically need support to adopt modern farming methodologies.
Agriculture technology solutions focus on extension services for farmers to adopt new technologies and innovation. ICTs can amplify the efforts of the extension agents to help farmers plan what crops to grow, source inputs for crop cultivation, and selling their produce in local market.
Chatbots offer an exciting opportunity for governments to engage farmers on the social media platforms where farmers already congregate. For example:
- Facebook chatbots are a popular way to answer basic questions or help farmers apply for government support services.
- SMS text message chatbots can also help private sector companies develop new business leads and educate extension agents on their services.
ICT communication tools can play a crucial role in supporting farmers to access new inputs, credit, and markets with personalized and customized services.
Examples of e-Agriculture Programs
The potential to achieve high impact at the farm-level requires appropriate technology and adoption methodologies. International development organizations can use e-Agriculture communication programs like those below to support ICTforAg value chain ecosystems in developing countries.
9 Lessons Learned From Failed AgriTech Interventions in African Countries
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What is Our Role in Protecting Farmer Data Privacy and Security?
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FAO Guide: How to Have Gender and ICT Success in Agriculture
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Two New USAID Toolkits: How to Use Digital Tools in Agricultural Programs
Digital technology has enormous potential to improve food security in Feed the Future countries and around the world. There are four broad categories of digital...
Creating Killer Content for ICT4D Project Success – Your Weekend Long Reads
Creating killer content is critical to ICT4D success. One of the major barriers to digital uptake is a lack of incentives to go online because of a lack of relevant...
Are Your ICT4D Success Metrics Realistic or Fantastic?
At a past employer, my team was talking with our farmer constituents about their adoption of our new rice-growing ICTforAg technology. The team was shocked and...
The Critical Role of Verification Technology in Incentive-Based Prize Contests
AgResults is a $122 million experiment designed to answer the following question: can incentive-based prize contests, notable for successes in spurring the aviation...
The Current Status of Blockchain in Agriculture
“I am so excited about blockchain! Can you tell me what it is?”
With this, Hugh McDonough opened the panel, “Blockchain for Ag: Demystified and Demarcated”,...
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