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Featured: Farmers with phones

Natalia, who runs a mobile phone service, could plug a gap:

We have a database of farmers all across Kenya – we know they location, what they grow and size of the farm. At the moment we have a database of 30.000 farmers, but plan to expand up to 100 k in the next few months. We are searching for the way to commercialise this data source.

And there’s the rub. Advertisers may wish to pay for that list, but would the farmers really benefit? Alas, for the purposes of building a public good, like a better distribution map, no-one is likely to stump up. But Natalia, just think of the goodwill your company could derive if you shared the data, suitably anonymized!

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A gap in my understanding?

Ethan Zuckermen, Geek CorpsThe astonishing enthusiasm for discussions of all things gap-filling shouldn’t be surprising. We need to know what grows where, where it is most diverse, and where we haven’t explored in sufficient depth. Seems to me that most of the underlying datasets depend on outsiders coming in (or sitting in front of their models) and figuring it out. Would it, I wonder, be possible to turn that model on its head?

What if farmers texted the name of the crops (and varieties?) they grow to some spiffy app that collected the coordinates of the sending phone and the data, maybe even using some assumptions about language based on coordinates to translate the crop name?

Telcos could underwrite the effort by donating the cost of the SMS to the apps number. Farmers could be encouraged by offering additional credits on their phone, subject to some scrutiny. And gap-fillers would rejoice.

The big downside, as I see it, is that there is no immediate benefit to the farmers supplying the data. Eventually they enjoy some of the benefits that filling the gaps will undoubtedly bring. But in the meantime, who’ll pay?

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Biofortified’s take on the biofortification conference

Over at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, Jeremy has been critical of information coming out of the First Global Conference on Biofortification. He wonders if the organizers and attendees were/are too focused on a techno-fix rather than on diverse diets as a solution. This being a conference on biofortification, we talked about biofortification a lot, and it could be argued that biofortification is a techno-fix, whether by breeding or biotechnology.

Ah, but you just know there’s a “however” coming up, don’t you. Thanks to Anastasia for a great summary of the recent biofortification jamboree.