Integrating diverse knowledge bases for empowering local farmers in India

The dissemination of agricultural information process to the farmers of Baruipur, a community development block in West Bengal, India is studied. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect qualitative and quantitative data from 129 farmers and two government officials. The study reveals that among the available wide range of information sources and learning forms, farmers primarily value local knowledge as it is mainly experience-driven, practical and can be shared or transmitted informally among the farmers. But, informal local knowledge gradually gets influenced by extraneous factors, constructing an alternative pathway that resist the flow of information from reaching to the grass-root level. Limitation of genuine and accurate agricultural information impeded the empowerment of farmers at the micro level which demands for a superior integration among diverse knowledge systems with informal local knowledge. Here, the study identifies a more practical approach for knowledge integration, aiming to secure local preference, dynamisms and internal cohesiveness among participants from different domain. Further, this paper forwards a participatory approach based informal communication model, facilitating two ways communication for better and effective flow of need based, value added, accurate information towards holistic empowerment of the farmers at the ground level

Integrating diverse knowledge bases for empowering local farmers in India

The dissemination of agricultural information process to the farmers of Baruipur, a community development block in West Bengal, India is studied. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect qualitative and quantitative data from 129 farmers and two government officials. The study reveals that among the available wide range of information sources and learning forms, farmers primarily value local knowledge as it is mainly experience-driven, practical and can be shared or transmitted informally among the farmers. But, informal local knowledge gradually gets influenced by extraneous factors, constructing an alternative pathway that resist the flow of information from reaching to the grass-root level. Limitation of genuine and accurate agricultural information impeded the empowerment of farmers at the micro level which demands for a superior integration among diverse knowledge systems with informal local knowledge. Here, the study identifies a more practical approach for knowledge integration, aiming to secure local preference, dynamisms and internal cohesiveness among participants from different domain. Further, this paper forwards a participatory approach based informal communication model, facilitating two ways communication for better and effective flow of need based, value added, accurate information towards holistic empowerment of the farmers at the ground level

FOODIE: Farm‐Oriented Open Data in Europe

Ponencias, comunicaciones y pósters presentados en el 17th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science "Connecting a Digital Europe through Location and Place", celebrado en la Universitat Jaume I del 3 al 6 de junio de 2014.The agriculture sector is a unique sector due to its strategic importance for both European citizens (consumers) and European economy (regional and global) which, ideally, should make the whole sector a network of interacting organizations. Rural areas are of particular importance with respect to the agro-food sector and should be specifically addressed within this scope. The different groups of stakeholders involved in the agricultural activities have to manage many different and heterogeneous sources of information that need to be combined in order to make economically and environmentally sound decisions, which include (among others) the definition of policies (subsidies, standardisation and regulation, national strategies for rural development, climate change), valuation of ecological performances, development of sustainable agriculture, crop recollection timing and pricing, plagues detection, etc. Such processes are very labour intensive because most parts have to be executed manually and the necessary information is not always available or easily accessible. In this context, future agriculture knowledge management systems have to support not only direct profitability of agriculture or environment protection, but also activities of individuals and groups allowing effective collaboration among groups in agri-food industry, consumers, public administrations and wider stakeholders communities, especially in rural domain. To that end FOODIE project aims at building an open and interoperable agricultural specialized platform hub on the cloud for the management of spatial and non-spatial data relevant for farming production; for discovery of spatial and non-spatial agriculture related data from heterogeneous sources; integration of existing and valuable European open datasets related to agriculture; data publication and data linking of external agriculture data sources contributed by different public and private stakeholders allowing to provide specific and highvalue applications and services for the support in the planning and decision-making processes of different stakeholders groups related to the agricultural and environmental domains

Agricultural land systems : modelling past, present and future regional dynamics

This thesis arises from the understanding of how the integration of concepts, tools, techniques, and methods from geographic information science (GIS) can provide a formalised knowledge base for agricultural land systems in response to future agricultural and food system challenges. To that end, this thesis focuses on understanding the potential application of GIS-based approaches and available spatial data sources for modelling regional agricultural land-use and production dynamics in Portugal. The specific objectives of this thesis are addressed in seven chapters in Parts II through V, each corresponding to one scientific article that was either published or is being considered for publication in peer-reviewed international scientific journals. In Part II, Chapter 2 summarises the body of knowledge and provides the context for the contribution of this thesis within the scientific domain of agricultural land systems. In Part III, Chapters 3 and 4 explore remotely sensed and Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) data, multitemporal and multisensory approaches, and a variety of statistical methods for mapping, quantifying, and assessing regional agricultural land dynamics in the Beja district. In Part IV, Chapters 5–7 explore the CA-Markov model, Markov chain model, machine learning, and model-agnostic approach, as well as a set of spatial metrics and statistical methods for modelling the factors and spatiotemporal changes of agricultural land use in the Beja district. In Part V, Chapter 8 explores an area-weighting GIS-based technique, a spatiotemporal data cube, and statistical methods to model the spatial distribution across time for regional agricultural production in Portugal. The case studies in the thesis contribute practical and theoretical knowledge by demonstrating the strengths and limitations of several GIS-based approaches. Together, the case studies demonstrate the underlying principles that underpin each approach in a way that allows us to infer their potentiality and appropriateness for modelling regional agricultural land-use and production dynamics, stimulating further research along this line. Generally, this thesis partly reflects the state-of-art of land-use modelling and contribute significantly to the introduction of advances in agricultural system modelling research and land-system science

Integrating diverse knowledge bases for empowering local farmers in India

The dissemination of agricultural information process to the farmers of Baruipur, a community development block in West Bengal, India is studied. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect qualitative and quantitative data from 129 farmers and two government officials. The study reveals that among the available wide range of information sources and learning forms, farmers primarily value local knowledge as it is mainly experience-driven, practical and can be shared or transmitted informally among the farmers. But, informal local knowledge gradually gets influenced by extraneous factors, constructing an alternative pathway that resist the flow of information from reaching to the grass-root level. Limitation of genuine and accurate agricultural information impeded the empowerment of farmers at the micro level which demands for a superior integration among diverse knowledge systems with informal local knowledge. Here, the study identifies a more practical approach for knowledge integration, aiming to secure local preference, dynamisms and internal cohesiveness among participants from different domain. Further, this paper forwards a participatory approach based informal communication model, facilitating two ways communication for better and effective flow of need based, value added, accurate information towards holistic empowerment of the farmers at the ground level

Good Wetland Agricultural Practices

Within the Guiding Agriculture Wetland Interaction (GAWI) project the Driver!Pressure!State! Impact!Response (DPSIR) approach has been adopted to describe and analyse agriculture!wetland interactions. The DPSIR approach provides a consistent framework to analyse the complex causal chain among drivers, pressures, state and impacts, and facilitates the targeted identification of response strategies aimed at improving the sustainability of wetlands

Foodways in transition: food plants, diet and local perceptions of change in a Costa Rican Ngäbe community

Background Indigenous populations are undergoing rapid ethnobiological, nutritional and socioeconomic transitions while being increasingly integrated into modernizing societies. To better understand the dynamics of these transitions, this article aims to characterize the cultural domain of food plants and analyze its relation with current day diets, and the local perceptions of changes given amongst the Ngäbe people of Southern Conte-Burica, Costa Rica, as production of food plants by its residents is hypothesized to be drastically in recession with an decreased local production in the area and new conservation and development paradigms being implemented. Methods Extensive freelisting, interviews and workshops were used to collect the data from 72 participants on their knowledge of food plants, their current dietary practices and their perceptions of change in local foodways, while cultural domain analysis, descriptive statistical analyses and development of fundamental explanatory themes were employed to analyze the data. Results Results show a food plants domain composed of 140 species, of which 85 % grow in the area, with a medium level of cultural consensus, and some age-based variation. Although many plants still grow in the area, in many key species a decrease on local production–even abandonment–was found, with much reduced cultivation areas. Yet, the domain appears to be largely theoretical, with little evidence of use; and the diet today is predominantly dependent on foods bought from the store (more than 50 % of basic ingredients), many of which were not salient or not even recognized as ‘food plants’ in freelists exercises. While changes in the importance of food plants were largely deemed a result of changes in cultural preferences for store bought processed food stuffs and changing values associated with farming and being food self-sufficient, Ngäbe were also aware of how changing household livelihood activities, and the subsequent loss of knowledge and use of food plants, were in fact being driven by changes in social and political policies, despite increases in forest cover and biodiversity. Conclusions Ngäbe foodways are changing in different and somewhat disconnected ways: knowledge of food plants is varied, reflecting most relevant changes in dietary practices such as lower cultivation areas and greater dependence on food from stores by all families. We attribute dietary shifts to socioeconomic and political changes in recent decades, in particular to a reduction of local production of food, new economic structures and agents related to the State and globalization

The nature and trends of agricultural research development in Africa : an informetric study

The study recognizes Agriculture as the mainstay activity of most economies in Africa and analyses research nature and trends in the discipline by using descriptive informetrics and focusing on seven indicators, by using the AGRICOLA and ISI-E databases from 1991 to 2005. We observed that research output in the discipline is much higher in South Africa and Kenya, and research collaboration is greater than non-collaborative research output and collaboration is less among African countries. The most popular research domains were found to exist in environmental science, soil science, plant/crop production and [agricultural] economics. Helpful conclusions and recommendations for an Agricultural policy, capacity and research orientation have been made

Measuring agricultural innovation system properties and performance: Illustrations from Ethiopia and Vietnam

"The rapidly changing nature of the global food and agriculture system suggests the need to rethink how innovation can contribute to developing-country agriculture. While scientific and technological changes in agriculture can help foster productivity growth and poverty reduction, their contributions are incomplete without commensurate changes in the wider system of which they are a part. A more systems-oriented understanding of how innovation occurs in a society and economy is critical to promoting dynamism, responsiveness, and competitiveness in developing-country agriculture and, ultimately, to enhancing productivity and reducing poverty. However, without adequate measures of the properties and performance of an agricultural innovation system, it is difficult for policymakers, investors, donors, and practitioners to promote policies and investments that foster greater innovativeness in agriculture. This suggests the need for a measure of agricultural innovativeness that preferably extends beyond the “black box” approach of measuring only inputs and outputs, focusing on the underlying processes that contribute to building the capabilities needed to create an innovative agricultural sector. To this end, this paper attempts to provide a “proof of concept” that innovativeness in developing-country agriculture can be measured. It first identifies a set of indicators from secondary data sources that measure the key elements of an agricultural innovation system. Several hundred indicators are reviewed, validated, and aggregated into a unique Agriculture, Development, and Innovation Index (ADII). The paper then provides a toolkit for collecting and analyzing “systems-oriented” indicators that add more process-related nuances to the ADII with both attributional and relational data. This is illustrated with data collected in Ethiopia and Vietnam in 2007–08." from authors' abstractAgriculture, Developing countries, Innovation, Science and technology,

Bridging End Users' Terms and AGROVOC Concept Server Vocabularies

The AGROVOC is a multilingual structured thesaurus in the agricultural domain. It has already been mapped with several vocabularies, for example AGROVOC-CAT, AGROVOC-NALT , AGROVOC-SWD. Although these vocabularies already contained a good portion of non-preferred terms, the terms are collected under the literary warrant and institutional warrant principles; which means vocabularies were collected based on the documents and publications rather than user‟s queries. It is still very common that end users would use different terms to express the same concept. In light of above discussion, we need to bridge these vocabularies and the users‟ terms Backgroun