This article describes the experience of analyzing groups of Colombian fruit farmers’ capacity to collect information and their interest and ability to take advantage of the opportunities offered by information and communication technologies (ICTs). Three cycles were designed to understand the attitudes, skills, and current practices of fruit growers and to define the necessary conditions for effective information sharing. The three cycles involved individual farmers, farmer groups meeting face to face, and virtual meeting with farmer groups. The results contribute to the design of strategies for farmer engagement in the knowledge-sharing online platform of the AES-CE (Acronym in Spanish for Sharing Experiences for Site Specific Agriculture) project, designed to assist growers in improved decision making through sharing of multiple types of information from multiple sources. We find that farmers understand the usefulness of record keeping, but data collection is often imposed externally, and records are not generally used to better manage production. Farmers, overall, were positive towards information sharing and understand the benefits of using information from a wider environment, shared through an ICT platform, but shortage of skills in using these technologies is a serious limiting factor to expansion to a broader scale. We discuss future strategies that can be used to the design and implement ICT platforms which farmers can use to share information and improve their management.
Digital agriculture is likely to transform productive processes both on- and off- farm, as well as the broader social and institutional context using digital technologies. It is largely unknown how agricultural knowledge providing organisations, such as advisors and science organisations,...
This study aimed to identify the perceptions of farmer community towards the electronic media and relationship between different demographic characteristics of respondents with the use of electronic communication of TV and radio, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK), a province of Pakistan....
En este libro se detalla el procedimiento para valorar los cambios generados por los Laboratorios Territoriales de cacao, desarrollados entre el 2019 y 2021 con la participación de comunidades campesinas del departamento de Antioquia. Esta valoración se estructuró desde los...
Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and transitioning the planet to an equitable climate and nature-positive future by 2050 will require systemic shifts in how food is produced and consumed.
With the current realities of the food systems, the fusion...
Papa Andina began as a regional research program focusing on the Andean potato sectors of Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru, but later shifted its focus to facilitating pro-poor innovation. To accomplish this shift, a number of approaches were developed to foster...