In the above image I copied from the Facebook sharing of Searca Director Glenn B Gregorio, he is inspiring any and all of us: “Let’s get smarter; let’s go digital agriculture!” The lower image is titled by its source “Digital Agriculture” – is it?
(lower image[1] from Wallpaper Access)Mr Gregorio was the keynote speaker in the virtual launching of AgriEX, its common project with APPGeese, a start-up company based in Pasig, Philippines, to design a first-ever digital platform in the provinces of Laguna and Quezon (“Searca, APPGeese, Inc. ink MoA To Develop A Pilot Digital Agriculture Platform In The Philippines,” Nathan P Felix, 08 October 2020, Searca.org). The AgriEX Virtual Launch, with the theme “Magtanim Ay ‘Di Biro” (Planting Is Not Fun) was held on 19 February 2021 via Zoom and Facebook Live.
AgriEX is a farmgate-to-fork digital project, meaning it will help Laguna and Quezon farmers sell their produce using the Internet. I love it that Mr Gregorio refers to the target farmer with a new name – transfarmer – emphasizing the deliberate choice of becoming a different kind of farmer.
In the case of the PH Department of Agriculture (DA), the necessary assistance to farmers is much, much more. The DA news release of 05 September 2020, “DA To Strengthen Family Farms, Promote Digital Agriculture[2],” says Secretary of Agriculture William Dar said during the first-ever virtual meeting of the 35th FAO Asia Pacific Regional Conference held 1-4 September 2020:
It is important that we continuously empower vulnerable groups — smallholder farmers, fisherfolk, rural women, the youth, indigenous communities, and farm families, in general – by providing them the needed technical, marketing and financial (supports), amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Let us particularly note the 3 types of assistances Mr Dar enumerates that are needed by farms:
(1) technical, (2) marketing and (3) financial supports.
AgriEX is solely marketing, and that’s quite alright – marketing assistance is necessary especially now that government controls movements of people and produce.
As an alumnus of UP Los Baños, I’m more interested in the technical support that digital agriculture can provide farmers and fishers. The thing is that whether we advise farmers digitally or not, we tell them exactly what to do. We really treat farmers as robots.
If you look at the lower image above again, it shows many fields planted to many different kinds of crops. We do not teach farmers anything like that. Multiple cropping should also be packaged as among the contents of digital agriculture.
In summary, this is what I think the Knowledge Bank of Digital Agriculture should contain:
Opportunities, Options, & Obstacles in Agriculture.
Here’s talking mostly of the technical part of the knowledge bank of digital agriculture:
What are the Opportunities – including markets?
What Options does the farmer have with, for instance, rice? What else can he do?
What are the Obstacles to his crop and/or livestock labors?
We must make more knowledge available digitally if we want Philippine agriculture to be the best tomorrow via the transfarmers of today.@517
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