GFAR/GODAN/CTA webinar "Data-driven agriculture: an overview"
Channel: Global Forum on Agricultural Research & Innovation
Date: 23/02/2018

As part of GFAR's work on farmers’ rights to data and following up on the face-to-face course on Farmers’ Access to Data organized in Centurion in November 2017, we offer a series of live and recorded webinars to make the content of the course available to everybody. 
This series of webinars is co-convened with the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition initiative (GODAN) and the Technical Center for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA).

Information and updates on the webinar series can be found at https://blog.gfar.net/2018/02/02/gfar-announces-webinar-series-on-farmers-access-to-data/. 

About this webinar

[PowerPoint available at https://www.slideshare.net/gcard/gfar-godan-cta-webinar-datadriven-agriculture-an-overview]

Precision agriculture is a promising set of technologies that is data intensive, but which has limited adoption by small holder farms in Sub-Saharan Africa. Concurrently, current trends in sustainability, traceability, and compliance reporting demand that an ever-increasing amount of data be gathered as part of everyday operations in modern production agriculture.

The use of farm management information systems (FMIS) for decision support has shown great promise for improving farm yields and profitability. However, growers are often unsure of the value of the data that they are providing and/or receiving. How does this data help them make the right decisions to improve their yield and profitability? How do growers and service providers work together to simplify the design and use of farm data? How can smallholder farmers take advantage of data in a mutually valuable relationship with data providers?

Webinar Goals

Provide attendees a foundation for understanding the use of data for farming and across the agricultural value chain. Attendees should be able to apply the core concepts of using data for field operations, as well as how data is used across the value chain. Attendees will be introduced to the opportunities and challenges of using data, especially for smallholder farmers.

About the presenter

Dan Berne is a highly regarded professional business growth strategist with over 30 years’ experience. Dan led the effort to create an Ag Irrigation market strategy for the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance (NEEA). He also conducted grower experience studies to help identify barriers to grower adoption of energy saving practices. Dan wrote or co-wrote many of the NEEA Ag Irrigation reports. Dan serves as the Project Manager on AgGateway’s Precision Ag Irrigation Language data standards project. He is an affiliate of the Chasm Institute, and a certified practitioner of Innovation Games.

Dan started the “Lagom Ag Initiative” within his company to help accelerate the adoption of precision farming practices and improve the use of digital agricultural methodologies. Lagom is a Swedish word that means “just enough.” It is also used to mean “simply perfect.” It fits our philosophy of helping farmers use just enough water, just enough fertilizers, just enough energy to be profitable while increasing or maintaining yield.

Facilitator: Valeria Pesce, GFAR.