Apps for farmers
how sensors and APIs can help farmers with sustainable farming
I have always been disturbed by the struggles farmers are facing. They are kept in a vicious cycle of poverty as they increasing rely on chemical fertilizer and proprietary seeds which they use on the farms they do not even own. Nature is not on their side either, extreme weather events are happening at higher frequency. Furthermore, although they are taking huge upfront risks, the market and channel mechanisms are not structured to hedge these risks of farmers. In fact, a watchdog recently called on UK foreign aid to focus more on farmers.
Here is the concept codenamed “FarmBox” — taking cues from existing concepts. FarmBox is an open source hardware initially built on top of Arduino circuit board with numerous sensors to measure soil attributes, weather conditions and nutrient levels over time. These massive amount of soil data is streamed onto central cloud database and can be shared publicly under a creative commons license. Hence, developers and data crunchers can dig into the soil data via RESTful APIs to come up with innovative apps such as “what to grow when” app and “auto watering” app.
FarmBox is not just for rural farmers — it is also for urban farmers and permaculturalists. Growing variety of crops on tiny plots in cities are quite challenging. FarmBox can be used on these modern farms for automation purposes. The scenario gets more interesting here as now there would be social connections and knowledge exchanges among rural and urban farmers via the FarmBox platform. Through these ties and conversations, social actions can be taken for other challenges (land ownership, channel, etc) faced by rural farmers.
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