Climate smart agriculture [Video]
Speaking to Climate Change TV at the recent COP21 Climate Conference, CABI’s Dr Janny Vos stressed the impact of climate change on agriculture, especially for the world’s 500 million smallholder farmers. She focused on the balance that must be found to help smallholders become climate smart farmers while, at the same time, being able to grow enough produce to…
CABI calls for support for farmers at COP21
This month, world leaders gathered in Paris to agree a new deal on climate change. CABI delegates attended this historic COP21 Climate Conference, raising awareness about agriculture and the environment, and the challenges facing the world’s rural communities and smallholder farmers. We share some of the highlights of CABI’s participation in the event. On 8…
Update: Plant Health News (16 Dec 15)
Here’s a taste of some of the latest stories about plant health, including typhoons and greening disease hitting China citrus crops, avocado exports threatened by phytosanitary problems in Mexico and the World Food Programme working to connect smallholder farmers to markets. Click on the link to read more of the latest plant health news!
Plantwise celebrates helping farmers with more than 150,000 plant health queries
Plantwise is thrilled to announce over 150 000 records of visits by farmers to plant clinics have now been stored on the secure part of the Knowledge Bank site, the Plantwise Online Management System (POMS). Plant doctors are diagnosing pests and diseases and providing recommendations to help farmers reduce crop losses.
Update: New Pest & Disease Records (09 Dec 15)
We’ve selected a few of the latest new geographic, host and species records for plant pests and diseases from CAB Abstracts. Records this fortnight include Pyricularia oryzae affecting barley crops in Corrientes, Argentina, the incidence of cereal cyst nematodes in the East Anatolia region of Turkey and new aphid records for Saudi Arabia.
Plant doctors share their experience of e-plant clinics
Plantwise held an e-plant clinics review workshop on September 8th-9th in Machakos, Kenya. This workshop brought together the 30 plant doctors who, with funds from Dow AgroSciences, are now equipped with tablets and have been running e-plant clinics since their training in June 2015. The plant doctors are using the tablets in their clinics to…
Who owns open agricultural data?
This is an edited re-blog from an Open Data Institute (ODI) blog post published under Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0 UK license by Martin Parr, Head of Open Data at CABI. Follow Martin on Twitter. The Plantwise programme has developed a knowledge bank to share Good Agricultural Practice and a very high level of anonymised data about incidences of plant…
Open Data & Farming 101
by Ben Schaap, Tim Davies and Ana Brandusescu, GODAN What is open data? We all make decisions everyday based on different sources of information. Much of that information ultimately starts out as digital data. Open data is about changing the default, so that instead of being locked away for the benefit of a few, data…
Update: Plant Health News (02 Dec 15)
Here’s a taste of some of the latest stories about plant health, including a boost for parasitic weed research in Africa from the Gates Foundation, benefits of modern farming come to Peru and a surge in climate change-related disasters posing a growing threat to food security. Click on the link to read more of the latest plant…
Plant doctors share advice using WhatsApp and Facebook in Central America
by Erica Chernoh and Eduardo Hidalgo, CABI Haga clic para la versión español de abajo The software application WhatsApp is being used by plant doctors in Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Honduras to provide and receive plant diagnostic support. WhatsApp has proven to be popular in many countries, because it is a free communication tool…