Small-scale farmers in Kenya can now store and manage data on the pesticide content in their crops before exporting them, thanks to a cloud-based mobile platform that keeps track of pesticide residues in produce.
Farmforce software, an initiative of the Swiss-based Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, will phase out time-consuming manual farm record-keeping and replace it with an online version that can be accessed by farmers freely via a mobile phone, according to Business Daily Africa of Kenya.
The Syngenta Foundation, backed by the Swiss government, developed the $2 million platform in 2011 with the help of a team based in Switzerland and a support team in Kenya.
Furthermore, the technology is not restricted to horticulture; it can be used for all types of crops.
Already countries such as Ghana, Guatemala, Indonesia, Nigeria and Zimbabwe have expressed interest in the service. It's particularly useful where quality standards and traceability requirements for formal markets are an issue.
With 5 million farmers, including small subsistence growers and large industrial agriculturalists, Kenya has been a hotbed of technological innovations for the agrarian community, according to the 2011 World Bank's e-sourcebook ICT in Agriculture.
Uganda is also using a cloud-based mobile platform to combine agricultural information and financial services designed for smallholder farmers, reports the Christian Science Monitor . For example, farmers can order and pay for seeds and fertilizers with their mobile phones, and also collect payment for their produce using the same service.
