In order to keep up with the challenges of ensuring nutrition for growing populations, the need for specific and reliable data to mitigate risks to agriculture from climate change, and to include smallholder farmers as stakeholders in the data revolution, the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), India recently launched ‘FarmerZone’.

Envisaged as an intuitive and collective open-source cloud-based data platform for providing climate smart high-tech solutions to smallholder farmers, FarmerZone is targeted at improving the lives of farmers by catering to a variety of farming needs – from coping with climate change, weather predictions and soil, water and seed requirements, to market linkages to sell produce directly from the farm.

The DBT organized a Smart Agriculture Conclave between 29 August – 1 September 2017 in New Delhi to launch the platform and invite collaborations from leading international experts.

At the conclave, experts from private, public and non-profit sectors along with farmers, brainstormed implementable solutions and discussed their potential role in designing and developing FarmerZone. The main aim of this platform is to design a model that can be scaled up and applied across a number of different agro-climatic zones.

For the full story from ICRISAT, a Partner in GFAR, click here.