The real-time monitoring solution of AgroPestAlert's agricultural pests has been aimed from the beginning to offer the maximum value at the lowest possible price to make it available to both the small farmers and large agricultural companies.For this reason, we discarded from the beginning not to develop the new predominant technology from years ago, the recognition of images from photographs taken from the pests flying into the electronic traps. They are too expensive and highly demanding computational resources and data bandwidth to be massively adopted by small farmers in less developed countries.In instead we develop a low-cost, robust, rugged, minimalist, energy-efficient, low-bandwidth product that makes it ideal to use in extensive agriculture with poor telecommunications infrastructure.To do this, we detect, identify and classify the pests according to their flight hum (wingbeat), so we use techniques of analysis of tiny sound files instead of large photo files.Our plan to address the challenge rests on 6 actions:Information gathering of agricultural practices and socio-economic conditions of small-scale farmers ' groups and the institutions that support their activity.Based on that information will adjust our pest detection solution to provide the services that these groups of farmers demand, in a scheme of costs that guarantee their long-term economic viability.A package of actions will be built to include, as is obvious, the adoption of the proposed technology, as well as the creation of groups of instructors that transmit this Know-how among the groups of small farmers.At the same time, these actions will be coordinated with international and national organizations to help small scale farmers in the developing world.Of particular importance is to provide with our technology to the warning stations of pests and local R &D institutions in Agtech, so that in addition to adopting our technology, they serve as diffusers of this knowledge and administrators of issuing of early alerts of infestation of agricultural pests among farmers.Controlled pilot tests will be carried out to collect: a) production information, b) use of resources, among the most important, of pesticides, and c) problems of technological adoption that allows making an objective evaluation of the real applicability of our technology in a case of limited of financial and infrastructure resources. These results will be widely disseminated in specialized journals as well as in any printed or digital media interested in the topic.The data collected through the installed trap stations will be deployed thru a free public access Web portal to show the catalog of pests monitored in real time, and their data set collected in every catch. We will document the entire human experience and the project deployment and operation of the trap network. It will undoubtedly be a meeting point for discussing the benefits of adopting new technologies in the fight against hunger and the viability of sustainable agriculture.
Comments