11 Best Apps for Your Next Trip to the Farmers Market

Dirty Dozen. Free. Published by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a nonprofit environmental research organization. This app focuses on which types of conventionally raised produce are the lowest in pesticides and which types are the highest. Lists include the Dirty Dozen, like apples, spinach, and grapes, and the Clean Fifteen, like sweet corn, asparagus, and cantaloupe. The app helps decide when finding an organic alternative is especially important. The Dirty Dozen Plus, an expanded app, includes a list of hot peppers and leafy greens.

Farmstand. Free. The app lists more than 8,700 farmers markets around the world and connects shoppers with markets for locally grown food. It supports local communities by supporting linking users to each other by allowing them to take and post pictures of markets and vendors, alert others to great finds, and browse information posted by fellow market-goers. Markets can be sorted by location and opening times.

Good Guide. Free. A wide-ranging shopping app that includes everything from produce to pet food, the Good Guide rates products and producers according to their health, environmental, and social benefits. In the case of fresh produce, dairy, and meats, items can be sorted using filters such as organic, vegan, and specific nutrition aspects (low sodium, etc.). The app can be tailored to highlight shoppers’ personal requirements.

Harvest. Paid. The app provides a list of pesticide levels on fruit and vegetables and instructs shoppers on methods for picking the best and ripest piece in-season produce, from shaking blueberries to knocking on watermelons. It also provides information on the best means of storage for different kinds of produce.

HarvestMark Food Traceability. Free. Participating fruit, vegetable, and dairy brands label their products with a 16-digit HarvestMark code or QR code; shoppers use the app to scan the code, retrieve the product’s harvest information, and give feedback. The app connects food producers with their customers and offers food production transparency.

Locavore. Free. Locavore has a large database of local farmers markets, farms, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), and vendors selling organic produce and in-season foods. It showcases recipes using in-season ingredients and also allows users to tag local sellers, share reviews, and post new finds.

Love Food Hate Waste. Free. Produced by the United Kingdom-based organization WRAP, the app helps shoppers reduce food waste by better organizing their kitchen, cooking, and shopping habits. It helps eaters keep track of what’s in their cupboards, posts alerts where there are duplicate items, highlights recipes for how to best use the food that’s already there, and cuts down on unnecessary purchases.

Seafood Watch (U.S.) / Good Fish Guide (U.K.). Free. Optimized for use in the United States or in the United Kingdom respectively, these two apps help shoppers identify the most sustainable seafood options at the market. Seafood Watch highlights best choices and indicates the options to avoid. The Good Fish Guide uses a traffic light rating system.

Seasons. Paid. The app lists natural growing season data and local availability of hundreds of kinds of produce, from herbs to mushrooms to fruits. It also includes the import seasons of produce, photos, and the location of farmers markets around the world.

True Food. Free. Some countries, including the United States, do not require mandatory labeling of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). This app, created by the nonprofit environmental advocacy organization Center for Food Safety, helps shoppers identify which foods contain GMOs, including dairy products, meat, and meat alternatives.

What’s on my food? Free. Created by the Pesticide Action Network (PAN), this app accesses an extensive and up-to-date database of all pesticides used on various kinds of produce. Pesticide residues remain on some fruits and vegetables even after washing. Watermelon in the United States, for example, can have up to 26 different pesticide residues by the time it reaches market, according to PAN. The app illuminates the health effects of each pesticide, from the relatively benign to the downright dangerous.

Read the orginal: http://foodtank.com/news/2014/10/harvesting-the-best-10-apps-for-healthy-organic-shopping 

Five Ways Cell Phones are Changing Agriculture in Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa now has more than 650 million mobile phone subscribers. Mobile technology is especially transformative for the agriculture sector. Here are five important ways cell phones are changing African agriculture:

1) Access to market prices: Mobile phones allow farmers to gain access to vital informationabout prices of crops before they travel long distances to markets. Cell phone services employ SMS text messaging to quickly transfer accurate information about wholesale and retail prices of crops, ensuring farmers can  negotiate deals with traders and improve their timing of getting crops to the market. SokoniSMS64 is one popular service used in Kenya to provide farmers with accurate market prices from around the country.

2) Micro-insurance: Cell phones are also used for a “pay as you plant” type of insurance. Kilimo Salama, meaning “safe agriculture” in Swahili, is a micro-insurance company that protects farmers against poor weather conditions. The insurance is distributed through dealers who utilize camera phone technology to scan and capture policy information through a code using an advanced phone application. The information is then uploaded to Safaricom’s mobile cloud-based server that administers policies. Farmers can then receive information on their policy, as well as payouts based on rainfall, in SMS messages. This is a paperless, completely automated process.

3) iCow from M-Farm: This cell phone application calls itself “the world’s first mobile phone cow calendar.” It enables farmers to keep track of each cow’s individual gestation so farmers never miss the valuable opportunity to expand their herd. iCow also keeps track of feed types and schedules, local veterinary contact information, and precise market prices of cattle.

4) Instant weather information: Mobile technology provides farmers with crucial weather data so they can properly manage their crops. Programs such as Tigo Kilimo in Tanzania give small-scale farmers instant weather information combined with appropriate agricultural tips.

5) CocoaLink: This app makes use of western Ghana’s rapidly expanding mobile network to deliver important information to cocoa farmers. The World Cocoa Foundation created this program to provide free voice and SMS text messages about farm safety, child labor, health, and improvements in farming practices, crop disease prevention, and crop marketing. Farmers receive messages in English or their local language.

by Suzannah Schneider

How Smallholder Farmer Access to ICTs are Improving Farming

My earliest memories on issues involving small holder farmers’ access to Information and Communication Technologies are with the introduction of the radio. I had recently migrated from Kenya to India in the early days of 1970 to study and everything was new and strange to me, including Indian village life.

My family had a farm in a village in Telengana in South-Central India. Villagers would gather daily around 6:30 in the evening at the Panchayat (community) building to listen to Krishi Darshan (Farmer’s Voice). The radio, a valve set operated on electricity to receive broadcasts in the medium wave (MW) band, was kept in a cupboard under lock and key in the Panchayat building. It was hooked up to a large, trumpet-like loud speaker, on a wooden pole outside the structure. The village children would gather in the front, while the male villagers sat on their haunches on the ground. The Sarpanch (village leader), who was usually the largest and richest landowner, sat on a wooden chair. There were rarely women, as they were not allowed to mix with the males socially.

The radio program would last for an hour in the local language, but usually as spoken (or actually written in the program’s script) by the highly educated and not in the dialect of the ordinary villager. The villagers could not fully comprehend the program because of the rather “snooty” language. There would be a talk on a farming practice and sometimes an interview. Following the farmers program, there would be broadcasts of folk songs or a small educational skit. At 8:00, there would be the news and after it, the session for the village radio would end and the actual radio would be safely locked in the cupboard. The Panchayat building was one of the few buildings that had electricity. There was always disappointment when there was no electricity and the radio could not operate.

This scene reveals a lot regarding ICTs and their access to the resourceful poor farmer. The control of the ICT in the hands of the Sarpanch, who also had the only capacity to operate the radio in the village, the hierarchy, class, caste and gender differences in the village community in the access to its broadcast, the design, and delivery of content along with the problems, regarding necessary infrastructure such as electricity needed to effectively use the technology.

The stranglehold on real control and access to the radio in villages in India was only broken when lower cost, domestically made “transistor” radios, were available in the market. Then, the radio could be owned and controlled by the farmer, so he could carry it to his field and the women in the family could listen to some of the programs in the evening in the privacy and seclusion of their homes. Of course, there were several social concerns expressed on the “bad” influence of the radio on the youth and women of the village.

The same scene repeated itself when television, initially through the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) (later through terrestrial broadcast) was introduced. Instead of the radio in the Panchayat building, there was the black and white TV set. However, for TV, it took more time to spread in order to be used by villagers. This was not only because of the cost, but also because it needed electricity to operate. Not many homes, especially among the poor, had access to electricity.

However, things changed, when the cost of TV was reduced through production in India, Cable TV became widespread and electricity connections in villages became more common. But, on the whole, for contributing to innovating farming and agriculture, it was largely a missed opportunity in using a powerful ICT. The content for farming and agriculture, largely from the government in an initially government-controlled media, were not paid attention to as an important public function. And, the private sector, with very little commercial benefit in generating the content, just ignored agriculture until recently. Now that rural incomes have grown and farmers are becoming consumers of products such as soap, cosmetics, refrigerators and washing machines, in addition to tractors and farm equipment.

Ownership of phones in India till late 1990s was only in the hands of a few. In villages, it was usually the richest that had a phone connection. All this changed when the public call offices (PCO) were introduced in India. Soon, all villages had at least one PCO. The cost of making a phone call was also reduced and almost everybody could use it. Within a few years, the cell phone was introduced and this brought in the shift in the ownership and control of the communication device. Along with it, the government introduced policies that made phone calls affordable by even the poor. Soon, many of the poor farmers had cell phones which they could use at their will and convenience. Today India has almost 800 million cell phone connections and is now ubiquitous.

With cell phones came several new services, including the Kisan Call Centres where farmers could call up government-run extension services for assistance on their farming problems. However, certain other issues in access continued such as the use of cell phones by rural women. In a country where women provide the majority of the agricultural workforce  and many of these manage farms on their own, not being able to by social barriers use cell phones and other ICTs is a major constraint for rapid innovation and capacity development needed for modern farming in the country.

The new generation of ICTs coming into common use in rural India is the smart phone. The smart phone promises access to the instant messaging, the World Wide Web, audio and video recording, playback and streaming capabilities, and the ability to send and receive multimedia while participating in social media. Some smart phones can even use applications that can share, exchange and process data while supporting decision-making. This has the potential to revolutionize access to information from across the world by farmers. At the moment the same issues as with other ICTs in the past such as of its access, affordability, the generation and design of the content so that it is relevant and useful, the capacity to make effective use of the information are being repeated. Apparently, we need to study the past and learn from it to be prepared for ICTs to be more useful in the present and the future.

Ajit Maru is Senior Officer at the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR) where he has been pursuing improving information and communications management and knowledge  sharing in agricultural research and development.

The Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR) brings together all those working to strengthen and transform agricultural research for development around the world. During 2014 and the International Year of Family Farming (IYFF), GFAR is working with Food Tank to showcase and raise awareness and understanding of the challenges faced by smallholders and help identify efficient ways to support family farmers.

Written by Ajit Maru

The False Banana, Key to Food Security

Enset is a plant native to Ethiopia that is often referred to as the false banana because, not surprisingly, of its resemblance to the banana plant. It is grown in the less arid highlands of the southwestern region of Ethiopia. Enset contributes to improved food security for approximately 15 million Ethiopians and, according to Ethiopian researchers, there is potential for expanding consumption of the crop. Over the coming weeks, Food Tank will feature different ways in which the enset plant has significant environmental, social, and economic benefits for farmers and consumers.

A recent report from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) shows that Ethiopia may be facing a famine, based on the coinciding factors of a growing population, detrimental weather conditions, and an unsustainably structured food system. While macro factors like these may be intractable, the production of one native Ethiopian crop has been historically proven to keep food security problems at bay: enset. In a report entitled The Tree Against Hunger from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), five criteria were listed to evaluate food security: adequate volume of food; adequate nutritional intake; annual stability of food supply; accessibility of food; and long-term sustainability of food production. Enset achieves, or helps to achieve, all of these criteria.

The plant is used mostly for its starchy pseudostems. The stems are scraped for starch, which is then combined with water to become a pulp. The pulp is fermented with yeast and turned into kocho, a type of bread. Each enset plant can produce up to 40 kilograms (88 pounds) of food after reaching maturation in four to five years. Tilahun Amede released a working paper in 2006 studying different cropping systems in the Ethiopian Highlands. In his report, he found that out of 14 major crops in Ethiopia, enset produces the highest yield per hectare and highest energy content per kilogram of edible yield. Its value is not unknown; a study of enset consumption patterns in Ethiopia from the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) found that it makes up 17.5 percent of food intake in rural Ethiopia, and is a vital component of south and southwestern Ethiopian diets.

It is an extremely hardy and versatile crop with high nutritional value: rich inpotassium, calcium, and iron, although low in protein. Kocho is often eaten with other food, like kale and kitfo, which creates a high-calorie and highly nutritious meal. In Dr. Amede’s 2006 report, he noted that areas with enset-based farm systems had the lowest rates of Vitamin A deficiency, partly due to the practice of eating kocho with kale. A 2004 report, also by Mr. Amede, concluded that barley-based farm systems would see improved food security by switching over 50 percent of their land to enset, kale and faba beans. 

Because it is a perennial crop, enset production is staggered so that the crop contains plants in several different stages of maturation at once. Its deep roots and high water retention make it relatively drought resistant, and the parts of the plant harvested (stems and roots) are more resistant to bad weather than flowering crops. Finally, the staggered pattern of perennial growth makes it harvestable year-round—making it a valuable way to ensure an adequate volume of food all year round. 

Enset also helps to increase the long-term sustainability of food production by reducing soil erosion and increasing soil fertility through leaf decomposition and manure application. Leaves and stalks can be used for animal fodder, helping to make fertilization a closed system.

While the plant is extremely valuable for food security, enset is used for more than just food – the fibrous leaves and stalks are used for production of clothing, shelter, and baskets, as well as for ceremonial practices. Parts of the plant are also used to promote maternal health by aiding in stimulating placental discharge, and traditional practitioners use it to help heal broken bones and reduce swelling of joints in both livestock and humans. 

One study from Debub University in Hawassa notes that the Ethiopian government has historically promoted research and development of cereal crops, which are more susceptible to natural disasters such as drought, and are typically sold for profit instead of directly generating food security and benefitting local communities. The Tree Against Hunger offers several potential reasons for a focus on cereals instead of enset. Enset production is complex and varies based on location, making it unappealing for many development programs, even for domestic Ethiopian aid initiatives. It also is primarily produced in some of the areas of Ethiopia that are least developed and most difficult to access. These barriers, and the tendency for Western developmental aid to focus on cereal production have limited international extension programs designed for enset. With high cereal prices and low yields, the importance of generating awareness and investing research and resources into enset production grows greater.

Disaster Resilience and Sustainability Initiative

Brachiaria Grasses for Improving Livestock Production in East Africa

Climate-smart Brachiaria Grasses for Improving Livestock Production in East Africa from ILRI

Teff production and market access in ethiopia

Teff production and market access in ethiopia from essp2

Sustainable agriculture development in Ethiopia

Sustainable agriculture development in Ethiopia from IFOAM

Adaptation to Climate Change for Smallholder Farmers in Ethiopia

1035 Adaptation to Climate Change for Smallholder Farmers in Ethiopia and the Contribution of Compost plus a System of Crop Intensification from SRI-Rice, CIIFAD, Cornell University

Goat milk safety and consumption

Creating a livestock sector with global competitor advantages in East Africa

Creating a livestock sector with global competitor advantages in East Africa from ILRI