Farmers, crop buyers and other sector professionals have started to harness smart gadgets and crunch numbers to improve productivity, reduce costs and smooth out wrinkles in the markets, they say.“There’s a digital revolution unfolding in Africa,” says Pascal Bonnet, a deputy director of CIRAD, the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development.
“There’s a huge need for this,” Thiam said, showcasing her work at an agri-tech conference in Dakar last month. It group-purchases to lower the cost for schools and in a final flourish organises the transport of the goods, with operations monitored in real time.A project called Pix Fruit, meanwhile, aims to help farmers who have until now estimated their mango crop by counting the fruit on a bunch of trees and then extrapolating for the whole plantation.Emile Faye, a French researcher in digital agro-ecology who works for Pix Fruit, says the margin for mistakes could be as much as a factor of 10.
That way, farmers learn the true worth of their crop, while wholesalers and price negotiators have a better take on the risk of glut or undersupply.
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