1. AGCommons
The CSI/CG
AGCommons Future
where and when do we meet?

2. Primary focus
 Provide location-specific,
timely advisory services to
– Farmer
– Farmer community
– Farm radio station
– Cooperatives
– Grassroots orgs and NGOs
– Agro-market sector
– Government
– Research centres
– Training institutes

3. What are such information service
characteristics?
 Must be relevant  Must be actionable
– filter out noise – informs a decision
– know the receiver – leads to work activity
• – tradition may be in the way
history
• status quo
 Must be timely
• plans
– pro-active advice
• location of operation
– partly real-time data based
• needs and wishes
 Must be reliable  Must be parsable
– build up trust – illiteracy, irrationality
– know past advices – language barriers
– advice good-practice – cultural barriers

4. Some realities

5. Roads

6. Tomato travel
 New Agriculturist (2005) reported Post-Harvest Loss in W African ranges
from 20-100%

7. From tomato flesh to soup

9. Real-time data
 Eumetsat data and data archive
 GeoNetcast distribution

10. GEONETCAST Capabilities : visualization
Every 15 minutes another image is animated -> 96 / day
Features:
nearly fully automated
settings used can be
easily changed, like:
•projection
•area of interest
•change background
animation prepared by
standard Windows XP
tools
done within 20 minutes
Virtually every derived parameter in a time
series can be animated, also with annotation

11. Import from Eumetsat Archive MPE time series
 24 hr aggregated precipitation
Rainfall (mm)
- 100
- 0
Time period (UTC):
2007-06-18-07:00 hr
to
2007-06-19-06:45 hr
96 images

12. Other satellite products, example VGT – 10 day
Dry Matter Productivity
Normalized Difference Vegetation Index
kgDM/ha/day
VGT4Africa.org
Vegetation Production Indicator
Normalized Difference Water Index
Reference to Normal
Vegetation development
Below
Above

13. CGIAR researcher role
 Step out of your research shell for this session only
 Reflect on big picture in the agro sector and role of
CG
 Reflect on what your research efforts produce
– in data sources
– in understanding and knowledge
that is exploitable to farmers and farmer orgs.
 Towards location-specific knowledge exploitation for
advisory services
 What can be exploited?

14. Provocations
 Accessibility
 Map
– not secured through a web portal
– pre-21st century technique to
 The farm-specific data stack
convey spatial, static information
– farmer profiling
– not your farmer info-product

 Agro-economic development
Seasonality
– crop rotation
– need to understand the seasons
– farm development, 5-year plans
of all processes (also roads,
inputs, markets) and their – district produce diversification
dependencies
 Cultural diversity is location-
 Real-time data specific
– shorten the info-cycles – no one-size-fits-all solutions
– crucial for up-to-date advisories  Making apps location-unspecific
and short-term predictions that (=generic)
can help build trust
 Farmer sensor network
– she knows the farm
– surveillances => local early
warning
– together they know the district
– ground-truthing army

15. Themes for discussion now …
 The communication channels
 Collaboration schemes for AGC
 Business models and sustainable
approaches
 The potential of real-time data and the wall-
to-wall ambition
 The farmer peer-to-peer e-Bay and long-term
farmer information communities
 Ex ante impact assessment on farmer
communities

16. Primary focus