INSPIRE Hackathons and SmartAfriHub – Roadmap for Addressing the Agriculture Data Challenges in Africa

Digital farming holds enormous potential for agricultural development, and giving farmers the tools to boost productivity and profitability. Although the benefits of digitalization are numerous, farmers feel they are not the ones benefiting from the value of data collected on their farms. Several issues were identified as factors restricting farmers from benefiting from data-driven agriculture. From the farmers’ perspective, there is a distinct lack of awareness of the issues surrounding farm data, and the complexity of these issues. This feeds into the imbalance that exists between individual farmers and larger agribusinesses wherein the former lack enough resources to address and analyse the significance of data, and so cannot take advantage of the value in it. There is also limited legislation for the generation, flow, exchange and use of data; where legislation does exist, it is not well understood by farmer organisations. From a policy perspective, moreover, there is very little guidance as to which agricultural data can be considered personal data, and therefore protected by privacy laws. This paper analyses the interactions and effects of the 5 Concepts: Open Agricultural Data, Open-Source Software, Citizen Science, privacy and legal and ethical issues that are assumed to advance the digitalization of African Food System (AFS and the enabling Digital Innovation Hub (DIH) - SmartAfriHub (https://www.smartafrihub.com/home).

The paradox of the peasantry in management and organization studies

Purpose Burrell (2020) challenged management and organization studies (MOS) scholars to pay attention to a topic they have mostly ignored: the peasantry, those 2 billion people that work in the rural primary sector. This paper aims to address the topic to expand Burrell’s challenge by indicating that the peasantry offers a unique context to study a paradoxical condition: the coexistence of persistent poverty and vanguardist innovation. Design/methodology/approach The authors advance conceptual arguments that complement the reasons why researchers should pay more attention to the peasantry. They argue that continuation of past research into field laborers, transitioning from feudalism to industrial capitalism, still has currency, not just because of the good reasons listed by Burrell (enduring relevance of the phenomenon in developing countries; sustainability concerns; acknowledgment of common heritage) but also because some seemingly archaic practices are evident in the economically developed countries where most management and organizations scholars live. Findings The authors show that in advanced economies, the peasantry has not disappeared, and it is manifested in contradictory forms, as positive force contributing to sustainable productivity (in the case of digitized agriculture) and as a negative legacy of social inequality and exploitation (as a form of modern slavery). Originality/value The authors discuss contrasting themes confronting management of the peasantry, namely, modern slavery and digital farming, and propose that a paradox view may help overcome unnecessary dualisms, which may promote social exclusion rather than integrated development.

Have City Dwellers Lost Touch with Modern Agriculture? In Quest of Differences between Urban and Rural Population

Frequently, urbanization and loss of an urban population’s connection to agriculture are given as the main reasons for decreasing societal acceptance of modern-day agriculture. An online survey of the German population in 2018 provided two selective subsamples of rural (n = 337) and urban residents (n = 560). Comparing group differences with regard to (a) the general societal perspective on agriculture and (b) positions on the use of digital farming technologies shows only little evidence of significant contributions of the used predictor items. Thus, no generalized tendency can be found that city dwellers are more opposed to agricultural developments based on different attitudes and perceptions.

Kisan360 (Agro App-A perfect Marketplace for all Farmers)

Six decades ago, Mahatma Gandhi said that agriculture is the backbone of Indian economy. The situation remains the same today almost the entire economy is sustained by agriculture, which is the mainstay of the village. Now a days, farmer sells their product at wholesale price to wholesalers, wholesalers sell them to retailers and make more profit then farmers. This application can help to break the chain between farmers and retailers. Through the application, farmers sell their products directly to customers and make more profit. In this application farmers can sell their equipment and buy new one. Farmers can direct knowledge about how to do digital farming. Once the farmers application is made available, any farmer can find relevant information about specific seed, fertilizer, farming equipment, weather forecasting, market rate, etc. This application is easily accessible by the farmers and other users too. Farmers as well as other users can ask specific question and provide valuable feedback through a specially designed feedback module. Keywords: Farmers, marketplace, wholesalers, retailer, users, admin.

Lettuce Growth Pattern Analysis Using U-Net Pre-Trained with Arabidopsis

To overcome the challenges related to food security, digital farming has been proposed, wherein the status of a plant using various sensors could be determined in real time. The high-throughput phenotyping platform (HTPP) and analysis with deep learning (DL) are increasingly being used but require a lot of resources. For botanists who have no prior knowledge of DL, the image analysis method is relatively easy to use. Hence, we aimed to explore a pre-trained Arabidopsis DL model to extract the projected area (PA) for lettuce growth pattern analysis. The accuracies of the extract PA of the lettuce cultivar “Nul-chung” with a pre-trained model was measured using the Jaccard Index, and the median value was 0.88 and 0.87 in two environments. Moreover, the growth pattern of green lettuce showed reproducible results in the same environment (p < 0.05). The pre-trained model successfully extracted the time-series PA of lettuce under two lighting conditions (p < 0.05), showing the potential application of a pre-trained DL model of target species in the study of traits in non-target species under various environmental conditions. Botanists and farmers would benefit from fewer challenges when applying up-to-date DL in crop analysis when few resources are available for image analysis of a target crop.

RURAL DATA DIVIDES: CRITICAL FACTORS OF DIGITAL AGTECH ADOPTION ON AUSTRALIAN FARMS

This paper details a qualitative investigation of human factors relating to adoption of digital agricultural technologies on Australian farms. We employed an ‘ecosystems’ approach to undertake a case study of a cotton farm’s transition to digital farming. Interviews and participant observation were conducted across the farm’s supply chain to understand how the experiences, perceptions, and activities of different stakeholders constituted a community-level orientation to digital agriculture, which enabled and constrained on-farm adoption. Technology providers installed a variety of data-generating technologies – remote sensors, automation, satellite crop imagery, WiFi/4G connectivity, and a customised data dashboard on the farm. However, the farmers lacked digital and data literacy skills to access, manage and use data effectively and independently. Specialist expertise for data translation was required, and support and resourcing for the farmers to acquire data capabilities was limited. This ‘data divide’ between the generation and application of farm data was complicated by broader issues raised by participants about data ownership, portability, privacy, trust, liability, and sovereignty, which have been observed internationally. The paper raises questions about the level of expertise farmers should be expected to attain in the transition to digital farming, who in the ecosystem is best placed to fill this ‘data divide’, and what interventions are necessary to address significant barriers to adoption in rural communities. It also highlights a tension between farmers’ $2 as decision-makers on their own properties and their $2 on digital technologies – and the ecosystems that support uptake of digital AgTech – to inform on-farm decisions.

Ethics of Digital Animal Farming

The demand for animal products is expected to continue to rise, which requires the development of efficient livestock farming systems. Environmental, societal and economic concerns regarding this industry are however accumulating, addressing the large resource demand, pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions and health concerns that the livestock industry is responsible for. Precision livestock farming systems allow the continuous automatic monitoring of various physiological, behavioural and phenotypic parameters of animals in order to increase productivity and animal welfare while controlling and minimizing the environmental impact. There is a high potential for digital farming to be the solution for responsibly and ethically feeding the growing and urbanizing population. However, many problems and concerns are still present in this developing industry and remain relatively unaddressed, starting with the ethical aspects in regard to the animal, including its objectification, human-animal relationships and welfare and ending with the societal implications of this digitalization. Concrete frameworks, inter-disciplinary studies and global legislation need to be put in place in order to ensure the safety and protection of the animals, farmer and society. Here, implications of digital farming for the animals, farmers, society and the planet are critically reviewed with the future outlook of digital farms.