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Rain-fed farming provides the bulk of the world’s food supply and has tremendous potential to increase its productivity to meet the 2015 hunger reduction target of the Millenium Development Goal (MDG). Water consumption around the globe has increased seven-fold in the course of the 20th century. Changes and innovations are needed in land, water and crop management but the efforts required to achieve this need to focus on increasing human and institutional capacity, build knowledge and improve management and infrastructure. These changes should also improve the livelihoods of rainfed farmers’ but large number of them are illiterate and how will they adopt innovations aided by ICT?
Marginal farmers are the part of the population in India that benefitted less from the economic boom and overall poverty reduction of the last 15 years [1], [2]. Despite their demographic relevance (in India, more than 80% of the farming families own farms of less than 4 ha, accounting for more than 50% percent of the total cultivated area), they represent a recurrent target for development agencies, but are difficult to help because of their reliance on rain and risk aversion towards additional actions once the planting has taken place. Previous efforts in ICT4D have focussed on communal information kiosk infrastructures but the sustainability of this infrastructure have not been achieved in many cases. We think that personal devices namely mobile phones that will provide also other benefits are better suited for contexts in which power availablity cannot be guaranteed but the telecommunication infrastrcture of mobile providers is independent of the power grid. In short the project aims at improving the livelihood of marginal farmers through a mobile phone based application that will allow them to retrieve and inject information on:
- farming strategies (such as choice of crops, choice of mono and multiple crops), price, expected yields, and risk scenarios based on predictions by the weather.
- scheduling of farming practices
- predictions of worst, average, and best case yields in financial terms
- probabilities and control strategies for pest and disease incidences for crops
- guidelines for harvesting
- economic aspects of water management of existing bore well use or procurement of water in relation to 3.
- local water levels and their fluctuations in bore wells