9 pages., Via online journal., In a world where the notion of ‘sharing of knowledge’ has been gained much prominence in the recent past, the importance of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to promote sustainable agriculture, especially when combined with mobile and open source software technologies is discussed critically. On this rationale, this study was carried out to explore the applicability of the concept of converging ‘Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)’ to promote sustainable knowledge sharing amongst the agricultural communities in Sri Lanka. A multi-stage community consultative process with a set of designated officials (“Sponsors”) and a series of semi-structured questionnaire survey with a cross section of smallholder agriculture farmers (n=246), were carried out in the Batticaloa, Kurunegala and Puttalam districts to gather the baseline data. This was followed by a number of field experiments (“Campaigns”) with the farmers (n=340) from same geographical areas. The two FOSS, namely: (1) “FrontlineSMS” for ‘Text Messaging’ and (2) “FreedomFone” for ‘Interactive Voice Responses’, were applied to evaluate the effectiveness of knowledge sharing within the farming communities. It was found that FOSS intervention increases the ‘Text messaging’ and ‘Voice Call’ usage in day-to-day agricultural communication by 26 and 8 percent, respectively. The demographic factors like age and income level of the farmers has positively influence on the knowledge sharing process. And also the ‘Mobile Telephony’ was the most extensive mode of communication within the communities. The outcome of analysis, as a whole, implies that, with a fitting mechanism in place, this approach can be promoted as a “drive for positive changes” in agriculture-based rural communities in developing countries like Sri Lanka, and those in South and East Asia with similar socio-economic and cultural perspectives.
17 pages, Modern agriculture is facing unique challenges in building a sustainable future for food production, in which the reliable detection of plantation threats is of critical importance. The breadth of existing information sources, and their equivalent sensors, can provide a wealth of data which, to be useful, must be transformed into actionable knowledge. Approaches based on Information Communication Technologies (ICT) have been shown to be able to help farmers and related stakeholders make decisions on problems by examining large volumes of data while assessing multiple criteria. In this paper, we address the automated identification (and count the instances) of the major threat of olive trees and their fruit, the Bactrocera Oleae (a.k.a. Dacus) based on images of the commonly used McPhail trap’s contents. Accordingly, we introduce the “Dacus Image Recognition Toolkit” (DIRT), a collection of publicly available data, programming code samples and web-services focused at supporting research aiming at the management the Dacus as well as extensive experimentation on the capability of the proposed dataset in identifying Dacuses using Deep Learning methods. Experimental results indicated performance accuracy (mAP) of 91.52% in identifying Dacuses in trap images featuring various pests. Moreover, the results also indicated a trade-off between image attributes affecting detail, file size and complexity of approaches and mAP performance that can be selectively used to better tackle the needs of each usage scenario.
India (Southern, Asia), agricultural, information, cell phones, extension systems, advisory services, technology, To achieve gainful development in agriculture to ensure food security in the north-eastern Himalayan region of India, an initiative was taken to develop mobile phone based agro-advisory system with the objective to empower the farmers by providing right information at right time through Information and Communication Technol- ogy mediated extension approach. 2000 farmers and farm women were selected as beneficiaries through snowball sampling method based on certain criteria. The major features of the system to deliver the farm advices (Pull Based) and information services (Push Based) through toll free Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS), Smart Phone Application, Mobile phone and Web based agriculture advisory system. It was found that on an average almost 200 advisories were provided every month, which even shoot up to almost 300 calls per month in the peak Kharif seasons as bulk of the advisories were provided during the months of May to November as most number of calls from the farmers came during the period. Majority of the advisories were provided on fishery management practices (17.32%), source of seed (9.95%), livestock management (9.18%), disease and pest management of crops (8.75%), training information (9.35%), rural development schemes (7.76%) etc. Moreover, the inclusion of need based train- ing component and convergence with different extension functionaries helped to develop an ICT based Stakeholder Interface (Experts-Line Departments-Agripreneurs-Farmers) in the field of agriculture in the region. This alternate extension system also helped to develop better rapport with the farmers and can be replicated in other hilly region of the world.
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 131 Document Number: D11317
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6 pages., Pages 37-42 in 27th annual meeting of the Caribbean Food Crops Society. Dominica, Volume 27., Authors recall some aspects of agricultural information before analyzing the problems of this information sector, the importance of which sometimes is unrecognized by agricultural administrators, researchers, extensionists, and producers. Perspectives for the development and better management and use of information resources are proposed through the use of new information technologies (databases, microcomputers, software, agricultural thesauruses, CD-ROMs, etc.), networks, and the sharing of resources through cooperation at local, regional, and international levels."