Watching the rains fall this season and the smile it put on our small-scale farmers as they enter the sowing season here in my small village got me thinking, there is really no stop to Agriculture, which comes as good news. I mean you just imagine if Agriculture came to a standstill, you can’t, right? Well, I don’t want to either. Let us agree, the current COVID-19 has beaten us big time in a way none of us would have projected. A whole lot of things will never go back to how they used to be, except agriculture will run as though nothing ever stopped. The lock-down phase of the pandemic saw a countless number of individuals from teachers to … name any other profession, resolve to agriculture for sustainability.
Narrowing to my village, and county at large, a good number ventured into cultivating onions, tomatoes and all sorts of vegetables, poultry and livestock keeping. Now if you notice, I am simply describing agriculture. People all over the country, I have come to learn, grew respective crops which are given to do well in their area during the period. This brings us to the consensus that truly agriculture is the only hope, our only hope.
First in place in the BIG 4 agenda of Kenya is food security, now you get how vital this sector is. If we are to beat food insecurity by vision 2030, we will have to do a lot better. Let's see, we have digitized health, security, and all these other sectors, why not digitize agriculture which is so crucial. The agriculture sector needs to get smart. We will all agree with McKinsely Global Institute’s Digitization Index that Agriculture is the least digitized of all major industries.
This year, I was more than privileged to attend the 2020 Youth in Data Digital Bootcamp courtesy of the CGIAR platform for Big Data in Agriculture and the Youth in Data Initiative. The workshop, If I am to call it, widened my sight of digital agriculture. Digital agriculture entails an array of technologies, channels and analytic capabilities that are being applied to make farming more precise, productive and profitable. To better understand the current implementations of digital Agriculture, check on our ‘Flipping the script on rainfall data’ published on https://ccafs.cgiar.org/blog/flipping-script-rainfall-data#.X6El7lBRWM8 to catch a glimpse of our proposed IoT rain gauges and how they are expected to influence small scale farming.
Regarding data; does anyone here know how tedious it is to get hold and analyze agricultural data? Well, take it from me, its breath taking. Agricultural data need to be made FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Inter-operable and Re-usable). If truly we are serious about food security, there is great need to apply big data approaches to agriculture in order to provoke global food production as well as solve challenges related to sustainable development, which I understand is also prime in the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
I believe our small-scale farmers are really trying to make ends meet and also to sustain the entire nation when it comes to food sustainability. We will only be doing ourselves a huge favor by helping them help us.
This been a very interesting topic, I will gladly enjoy taking your views on Digital Agriculture. Also, what did people from your home town pay more detail to during the lock-down phase, is it Agriculture as it was from my place? Let me know in the comment session below.