During the day on Thursday, we had two interesting meetings. The first was with a group from Mobitel, during which we discussed options for providing information to farmers (and gathering information from them) through SMS. The use of navigation menus to provide information, I think, holds potential for making a user-friendly interface for the interactions. By adding in voice response systems (meaning, providing needed information back to the farmer through voice rather than text), we can also lower some of the barriers to entry for the farmers.
The second meeting was with Arjuna, an agrinomics consultant from Tricadence, and was very useful in hammering out some of the details associated with simulating the impacts on a farm based on agricultural, social and financial decisions made by the farmer. For example, we could pretty easily model virtually the current farms based on the GIS data that has been gathered (in fact, this is already being done). The key, however, is not to show the farmer what their farm currently looks like. Rather, it is to show the farmer how it could look if they made decisions over time. Modeling and simulation software should be able to take the GIS data as an input, and based on various decision algorithms "predict" the impact of those decisions over time (think of a farmer planting a virtual crop of dragon fruit on an unused portion of their own land, and the simulation showing them how that dragon fruit crop has impacted the water needs of the farm and the nitrogen content of the soil). In the ideal form, this sort of simulation could take the form of a game where the farmer has to maximize profits while maintaining ecological balance and human potential.
There is much potential with this type of a simulation, but it depends on the format of the algorithms and the data that would allow the software to calculate the predicted outcomes over time based on changes that were made virtually.
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