Digital Green helps farmers adopt agri technologies
A retired bank employee M Sri Ram hailing from Vizianagaram, who is now into farming, admitted that utilising technology for agriculture was not his cup of tea, while speaking to The Hans India at AP Agri Tech Summit here on Thursday.
Visakhapatnam: A retired bank employee M Sri Ram hailing from Vizianagaram, who is now into farming, admitted that utilising technology for agriculture was not his cup of tea, while speaking to The Hans India at AP Agri Tech Summit here on Thursday.
By showing his old Nokia mobile, the 65-year-old Sri Ram said that only young farmers could tap the potential of smart phones. With the prevailing crisis in the agricultural sector, almost no farmer thought of envisioning his child as a farmer, he observed adding that a majority of practicing farmers belong to above 40 years age group.
Understanding the predicament of Indian agricultural sector and Digital Green chalked out strategies and planned to play an important in bringing behavioural change among the farmers. And for the same reason, the global development organisation has entered into an MoU with Andhra Pradesh at AP Agri Tech Summit.
Known for producing and dissemination of videos prepared by the farmers, Digital Green now has come up with another initiative for the farming practitioners, helping them to acclimatise with technology usage.
Speaking to The Hans India, Pritam Kumar Nanda, Regional Coordinator of Digital Green, said they would start five programmes in Chittoor or East Godavari for the farmers to make them adopt modern technologies and learn nuances in farming.
As part of their Virtual Training programme, progressive farmers learn about the digital tools and take farming courses before sharing their learnings with their fellow farmers at villages. The course content prepared by Agriculture department is being put up on the online platform for the progressive farmers to take lessons.
In another work, an app Loop was designed for farmers growing vegetables to sell their produce for profitable prices in the market. The third approach being followed by Digital Green is Self Service Tool on mobile, which has many videos of farmers explaining about various farming practices. In long run, we also make use of real time data to bring out yield estimation figures, Pritam adds.
Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS) is a model that helps to alert farmers by disseminating information about various stages of farming, he adds. Nick Austin, Agriculture Global Director of Bill Melinda Gates Foundation, said that after the success of community video, Digital Green was experimenting with the new model which efficiently train farmers inapp-based technologies.
By Y Abhishek Paul
