Innovation rush aims to help farmers, rich and poor, beat climate change


Foundation: Gates Foundation

Laurie Goering, who reports for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, shares certain innovations that can help farmers and combat climate change while at it.

Goering reports that, in the near future, African farmers can buy small robot vehicles and drones to help maintain their fields of harvest.

She alo highlights that smartphones have already enabled farmers in remote areas to take photos of sick plants, upload them and get a quick diagnosis, plus advice on treatment, and researchers also are trying to train crops to produce their own nitrogen fertilizer from the air.

According to Hans-Joachim Braun, who heads the global wheat program for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), based in Mexico, there was a "real shift in terms of the intensity of what we do together when we became aware of climate change."

Goering also exposed other innovations that will reach poorer small-scale farmers. Bruce Campbell, director of the CGIAR Research Programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) predicted there would be "many innovations, and the innovations are highly likely to be picked up elsewhere" beyond their source.

The most inspirational source is from people in developing countries, according to Svend Christensen, head of plant and environmental sciences at the University of Copenhagen. Read the Entire Article


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Ganesh Natarajan is the Founder and Chairman of 5FWorld, a new platform for funding and developing start-ups, social enterprises and the skills eco-system in India. In the past two decades, he has built two of India’s high-growth software services companies – Aptech and Zensar – almost from scratch to global success.