+Philipines establishes text message system for farmers
by Casey Rentz
[published on the Lay Scientist news site, 7/9/2010]
The Philippines has been described as the "text messaging capitol of the world" (perhaps a little over-zealous, but you get the point.) While only 60% of the Filipino population owns a cell phone (compared to over 100% in the UK,) those who do, text about twice as often as users in the US, for example.
The country is taking advantage of the prevalence of text messaging in a new initiative to improve efficiency of rice farming. Funny, I think of farmers as such a non-technological lot.
Farmers can now text back and forth with a central farming advisory, thanks to a system instituted by the International Rice Research (IRRI) council in conjunction with the Philippine Department of Agriculture. No, they won't be playing walkey talkey all day with rice-paddy-command-central. The system is automated: rice farmers text information about their particular farm, and back comes advice on amounts, source, and timing of fertilizers for growing use. The Agriculture Department hopes this will streamline production of rice and make more efficient use of resources in different regions.
Makes sense. Many Filipinos live on just $1 a day. Text messages on a prepaid Filipino cell phone (most of the citizenry prepay) cost the equivalent of .02 euro while phone calls cost .20 euro per minute, far more expensive. So, there's good reason to text instead of call.
There's also good reason to get creative in order to boost rice production. If it's true that, "In the last few months, global rice prices have fallen by more than 25%," according to Dr. Sam Mohanty, then east Asia needs all the creative ideas it can get.