As the world continues finding the right strategies and techniques for producing what people need to eat and use to produce products, experts on several occasions have hinted that numbers are crucial in understanding what to produce, how to produce and where the produce is highly needed. Without strategic collection and application of numbers, experts believe that the number of people who are likely to die due to hunger would be more than the expected figures in the next two decades and beyond.
At its recent Quarterly Webinar Series, the Farmkonnect Institute for Data and Agribusiness (FIDAS) walked farmers, investors and other stakeholders through the nitty-gritty of collecting structured, unstructured and semi-structured data for farming practices in Africa. Our analyst, who attended the Webinar, notes that with the QWS, FIDAS Africa is set to feed farmers and other stakeholders in Africa’s agriculture industry relevant and related data including data-driven publications towards smart decisions making and data conscious people as employees.
Our analyst adds that the Webinar Series had Professor Ndubuisi Ekekwe as the keynote speaker. Professor Ekekwe, who created Zenvus that helps farmers to understand happenings on their farms and use the data to make smart decisions in the context of planting and crop management, stressed the place of numbers in modern day farming practice.
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The Video of the Webinar
Data becomes the major element to build a system of food security and farmers need to understand what the market and consumers want before going into production. He further reinforced the importance of data in agriculture and mentioned that “if data in the form of numbers are available, then, it will be easier for farmers to make meaningful decisions.
While reinforcing the specific place of numbers, Professor Ekekwe noted that Pythagoras, through his invented theorem, has actually made us understand that numbers are essential in making crucial decisions. Therefore, small, medium and large-scale farmers in Africa need to develop interest in data collection, analysis and application towards better understanding of the squares in the industry; production, harvesting, marketing and transportation, our analyst reports.
In his presentation, Mr Adeiza Sulaiman, the Chief Executive Officer 10analytics, pointed out that big data will drive technological revolution in the agricultural sector. According to him, the main concern remains a wide gap between supply and demand of the data, which requires urgent intervention from stakeholders.