Big advice for small farmers
The Agrolly app provides crop advice as climate changes
From the foothills of Nepal to the wide plains of Brazil, small farmers are facing a growing problem: what crops should they grow as climate changes. In the past, knowledge would be handed down from generation to generation on how to tend the land. But now with climate change, that advice is less reliable. For instance, on the Indian subcontinent the monsoon patterns are shifting and for crops that depend on that source of rainwater, planting patterns that worked even a decade ago might now wilt when the monsoon doesn’t arrive on time.
This is a problem that the Agrolly team are looking to address. They met at Pace University in the US through the 2020 Call for Code Global Challenge and realized that even though they all came from different parts of the world, small farmers in particular were having their livelihoods upended by climate change. They also realized that small farmers usually had access to a mobile phone, even if it was just for their kids to use for school work. And so Agrolly was born.
The Agrolly app uses weather and climate data to provide growing recommendations such as what crops to grow and when to plant. The core technology behind Agrolly which helps small farmers by offering weather predictions is now available as the OpenTempus open source project. This makes it easier for more small farmers to leverage the technology and for others to expand and develop the technology for specific needs.
