1. Information technology can contribute significantly to improvement in agricultural and non-agricultural productivity and applications are common across livestock, agriculture, horticulture, aquaculture, forestry and all the service providers to agriculture.
2. The bottlenecks to exploiting IT are widespread access to reliable electricity and communication system support. With the shift to mobile technology access to reliable and reasonable speed Internet is a crucial requirement fore effective use of IT in agriculture and especially for smallholders, medium-sized holders and large operations.
3. Precision agriculture is growing quite rapidly, enabled by GPS receivers for mapping soils, weeds, diseases, yields and landform. Barriers to adoption of technology in contemporary agriculure include celular connectivity, Internet speed and others.
4. Traceability systems have been applied in a mandatory way in Australia now for several years using RFID technology.
Smallholders can achieve many of the benefits of traceability systems that larger producers achieve: improved disease control and improved quality assurance for users. In addition, RFID tags offer the potential for improved animal tracking and management of genetic improvement. In many respects its becoming the cost of not having a traceability system because competitors do have it. That means market access can be denied without adoption of effective traceability systems.
Г-н David Michael