World Bank’s “Internet Of Things” Vs PH’s “Internet Of HOPE”

Above is an output of the Korea-World Bank Partnership Facilityhaving financed a pilot study to invoke the Internet of Things (IoT) when farmers apply the technology alternate wetting & drying (AWD) in growing rice (image[1] from Blogs.worldbank.org). 

I’m a farmer’s son and an agriculturist, and so I appreciate the beauty of AWD in saving irrigation water. See the cellphone? It connects the farmer to the Knowledge Bank within the IoT to help grow rice following the AWD technology package.

All that is from the article by Vikas Choudhary & Karin Fock about a pilot AWD IoT (23 April 2020, “Precision Agriculture For Smallholder Farmers In Vietnam: How The Internet Of Things Helps Smallholder Paddy Farmers Use Water More Efficiently[2],” World Bank Blogs). The authors say:

The pilot found that IoT technology is technically feasible to apply with smallholder farmers. The system runs reliably with an uptime close to 100 percent, consistent precision in measuring water levels, and minor troubleshooting, outages, or maintenance. The IoT system is user friendly (sic) for farmers, and they appreciate its precision and convenience. Farmers applying IoT used between 13 to 20 percent less water than farmers applying conventional AWD.

The Vietnamese farmers find that a complicated technology package such as the IoT AWD can be handled by them using a cellphone. It is user-friendly; the setup is precise in its measurements, and is convenient to use.

My congratulations to World Bank! Ah, but I’m thinking more than an IoT – I’m thinking of what I call “Internet of HOPE” – where the Internet and cellphone will also be there, with a huge difference as to the Knowledge Bank, this time containing the users’ HOPE:

H for Hows
O for Options & Opportunities & Obstacles
P for Products & Processes
E for Economic Emancipation.

“Internet of HOPE” is actually my new name for my old concept of an Internet for farmers. For the last 17 years, I have been thinking of a Knowledge Bank that fits the proposal of then-Director General of International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and now Philippine Secretary of Agriculture William Dar, for the creation of what he called the Open Academy for Philippine Agriculture(OpAPA), which he submitted via PhilRice. That was when Leo Sebastian was PhilRice Director (he is now Undersecretary of Agriculture and Chief of Staff of Mr Dar); Mr Sebastian recruited me to PhilRice as a consultant. To help bring out into the real world OpAPA, I wrote a book that I titled The Geography Of Knowledge, 198 pages in pdf (a copy of which I keep to this day). I called it the “geography of knowledge” because you have to explore, if blindly, the territory – you don’t know what you don’t know, and that is why you need a Knowledge Bank. I submitted my OpAPA concept, but it was ignored, starting with the fellow to whom I submitted the pdf copy. But I believe in it even more now, so I am resurrecting it.

To Good be the Glory!@517

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[1]https://blogs.worldbank.org/eastasiapacific/precision-agriculture-smallholder-farmers-vietnam-how-internet-things-helps

[2]https://blogs.worldbank.org/eastasiapacific/precision-agriculture-smallholder-farmers-vietnam-how-internet-things-helps