What role can ICTs play in using Open Data in Agriculture and Nutrition for family farmers?

There is a conference on this theme ICT in AG in July in France. I provided the link below so all can see what topics are being discussed as they may relate to discussion topics posted here or contibute some valuable background context of what type of ICT is being applied and in what ag sub-domains. I hope this is helpful. 

EFITA 2017: EUROPEAN FEDERATION FOR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN AGRICULTURE, FOOD AND THE ENVIRONMENT. http://easychair.org/smart-program/EFITA2017/  

Although quantity and quality of food ,feed, fibers, etc. and their trade are dependent on the plant and product protection product  toolbox, three of the four main bottle necks are ICT in nature: (i) access to the knowledge of what is available in one country, (iii) access to the knowledge of what is allowed in the trading-buying country, (iii)  access to the knowledge of what is available somewhere else for growers to inform the plant protection industry of their needs and get access ot it. For those who wonder, the fourth bottle neck is regulary harmonization where training is more the bottle neck although ICT could contribute greatly. Since this information already exist, andn since a duplication has already been attempted by the FAO without success but wiht high cost, how could the Open data community make a common good so critical to growers, avaialble for all. As an example, the Canadian government made this information available for everybody with a canadian IP. This is a core question and I would argue that no data is free. Someone paid for it, one way or another. All governmental data, all NGO data, all institutional data have been paid for by paying their employees. The question is how do we get access to key data that exist in the private sector and that can not be duplicated for which the need for empowerment is so important and critical ( I would argue that as a society, we can not afford anyway to duplicate such work). Of course, this does not apply only to plant and product protection, but it is a concrete example that fundamentally govern production volume, quantity, and their trade and therefore leads me to position it as a good concrete example we ought to tackle as Open data community.

Thankn you to the organisers and participants for the very involved & enlightened inputs.

Jacques

Coming to this Forum on Friday I can only but build on the interesting reflections the community did. :)

As Amparo said, open data can happen because of ICTs - meaning that these tools do actually provide the opportunity to record, store and share the data among different communities.

ICTs are making data generation easier and cheap. Our smartphones actually generate useful data without us even noticing: every farmer with a smartphone in his/her pocket is a small weather station, as smartphones have a built-in barometer to calibrate its GPS that can generate data. To me, the most interesting disruption ICTs can produce in this field is thus making farmers become data active generators.

ICTs does also provide the opportunity to agriculture and nutrition stakeholders to share datasets, even when small and coarse, which can be extremely helpful in developing insights about the status of communities and their territories. mWater, for example, is an open data platform allowing anyone collecting data on water to share them with other stakeholders - breaking down data silos and making it actionable by all interested parties.

Generating data is not an issue anymore. The problem is to generate positive change beyond access to data themselves. Too often institutions (both from public and private sector) think that releasing data publicly constitutes an achievement per se - though it is rather a building block for progress.

That's why I agree with Gerard. For open data to be useful there is a need to create an ecosystem, which enables a successful application of open data in agriculture and nutrition. The big shift is starting to think in terms of services before data: so what services are needed by smallholder and family farmers, rural women and the youth? What services are needed by those agrifood stakeholders that can play a role in improving the life of rural people?

Within this framework, ICTs players and other stakeholders can have a role in pushing for interoperability among different applications, creating tools making it easier to operationalize data analysis.

I will be happy to highlight the ways in which Open Data can have a positive or negative impact next week in our Forum!

Greetings, Friends and Fellows,

Great reading all the contributions so far above and without reinventing the wheel, I shall reflect on the works and efforts of may experts accross the globe.

As we all may be aware, that over the last few decades massive technological development and opportunities have transformed people's lives includeing myself through e-resources. However, these opportunities may have not benefited the agricultural sector (farming families) in a significant way.

Farmers and various other actors along the value chains need significant amout of information. Today ICT is playing a leading role in knowledge exchange, targeted recommendaions,market integration and access to finance to make agriculture a profitable enteprise and attractive for men and women, especially the youths.

I think with the introduction of Digitial Agriculture, "which is an ICT and data ecosystems to support the development and delivery of timely targeted information and services to make farmig profitable and sustainable among small, medium and large scale farmers, while delivering safe nutritious and affordable food for ALL", may be considered as a welcome approach.

The diagram below is an illustration of how ICT can continouly improve agricultural revolution

Leaving no one behind becomes the greates task for International collaboration on (Open and Sensitive) data to solve the pressing challenges of both rural and urban settlements.

I also made a review of all the posts in this forum over the last week and tried to summarise what I read in a few paragraphs.

Universities: Starting from the beginning we heard about expectations made of Universities – namely that researchers should be providing software solutions for farmers. I think this is a relatively new role some universities have filled in recent years but universities have been around much longer. Myself I don’t fully support the idea that universities are necessarily the main drivers of change or technical solutions. As educational institutions universities are there to impart knowledge and critical thinking skills to students. This is achieved in part by giving students the opportunity to build new innovations to solve modern day challenges. In computer science this would involve requirements gathering, intelligent design and software prototyping. I don’t think such prototypes are all destined to become marketable products, for many reasons, but certainly can serve as models / eamples for innovation. More experienced development teams are required for building robust reliable software suitable for use by a wide range of stakeholders. In short I think Universities are part of the innovation lifecycle (idea to prototype) but are not responsible for product development.

Innovation Ecosystem: I’d like to contribute that that the overall innovation ecosystem must be understood by all stakeholders so we can effectively harness new technologies to bring change in agricultural operations. I’d say each of us needs to recognise what role we play in this ecosystem. Some of us are knowledge experts, some of us are data providers, software developers, interoperability experts…. other’s are agronomists, small holders / end users that will reuse data that has been translated to contextual knowledge but do not have technical skills. No one group has all the skills and we need to establish partnerships and teams to bring about change. We need policies and agreements between organizations to ensure we can work together effectively in an inclusive mission where all stakeholders are equal participants in the evolution of technologies in support of farmers. Some posts mentioned Farm data co-ops where pooling of local data sets, expertise and infrastructure would make it easier and cheaper to innovate on behalf of many stakeholders. This week’s posts have included many valuable requirements for digital infrastructure and software for them to be effective, useful and adoptable by farmers and other knowledge workers in the agric sector. Clearly the roles of the stakeholders involved in building such digital infrastructure are many. I don’t mention them all but we have roles of software designers and engineers, data providers brokering access to large archives of data, roles for data acquisition and storage operations e.g. from sensors or from field observations. Certainly software developers do need to understand the needs of end users and consult with farmers on what data or information they need and how they want to consume it.

Data: Raw data will need contextualization with previous trends or related types of supporting evidence. Data often needs to be transformed to actionable knowledge before it can be made useful.  Sources of data must be reliable and high quality so it can be meaningfully reused, including the design of prediction tools (e.g. crop / livestock disease or pest outbreaks, yield prediction). Software must also provide access to integrated data sets (e.g. together with GIS data) that is reusable for multiple purposes. Software systems should use common internationally recognised data exchange formats to ensure interoperability and unique web addresses should ideally be used for all online data sets.

Access: Trusted data warehouses and data brokers must emerge who can reliably provide cost effective access to data sets serving a variety of client tools designed to support end users. Software needs to serve data quickly for a wide range of ad-hoc queries integrating data from silos in real-time to avoid decision making based on legacy data. Appropriate cost models must exist for access to data and services. Access should likely be governed by rules similar to Net neutrality laws to ensure democratization of access to key data for all stakeholders, rich or poor. Access also means having data in local languages and accessible in many ways that are universal independent of end user literacy, e.g. keyword driven, icon, voice or interaction.

Education: Education is an essential part of the innovation ecosystem, we need to provide examples of successful innovation using farm data so that adoption of software and tools is not stalled. New software solutions should be universally accessible and end users must feel the transformational impact of having access to data and receive support in changing farm practices. Education and training are essential and can be provided through e-learning platforms also.

ICT is a complex and diverse topic and even more so, its application in agriculture. Overall the impact of Agricultural Open data must be felt at the farm level, as soon as the digital infrastructure, business models and software access modalities permit it. In my opinion we will best achieve this by first understanding the roles of all the stakeholders, so individually we can identify how we participate in bringing change and manage our expectations accordingly. As we define our roles we can align our activities accordingly. 

Dear Christopher and All,

thank you for this elaborate and well thought through summary of the roles of the different stakeholders.

Reading your overview, scanning the earlier posts (8 times the word government was mentioned) and being asked by the moderators to raise a flag for the follow-up eAgricultural on the AgPack. 

Is their a role for governments? 

• Should they be the main data providors in the ecosystem?
• To what extent are they responsible that the right accurate data is timely available ?
• Should they stimulate other (private stakeholders to play their role?
• Should they adapt the ICT education to make Open data for Ag work?
• Should they adapt the curricullum for extension officers or the extension curriculum it include the capactity IT handling needed to make Open data for Ag work?
• To what extent are they responsible that the countries have technological infrastructure is up to the task ICT? (e.g. the mobile or internet network)
• or maybe private partners should make it work.
• What do we expect? 

Based on this discussion and the next starting on the 10th of July with a webinar I am curious to learn what you expect from your government or what you recommend your government to do to start realizing impact with ICT and open data for agriculture?

http://www.e-agriculture.org/forums/discussions/e-forum-discussion-agriculture-open-data-package-agpackinfo

Dear Participants,

Many thanks for the wonderful comments, we will let the forum run for 1 week more so that we can give all the chance to express themselves in the three aspects of the questions.

Those interested in the next forum click here 

We salute your comments and wish for the best

Thembani Malapela, On behalf of the e-forum on ICT and Open Data