Farmknowledge.info

For extension workers by extension workers

Tired of Googling for hours on end looking for information on crops, pests and diseases? And even when you have the information, on closer inspection, you find you can’t even use it? Interested in having tailor-made information at your fingertips? Then this website is for you.

Google misses content and relevancy

Many agricultural practitioners believe that by Googling they can access a wide range of information to help them improve the management and productivity of farms. Sure, you can find a lot of information on Google, but be aware that Google misses loads of content because publishers often forget to tag their content properly. And since Google cannot make the necessary associations to bring content together, Google cannot distinguish between what is relevant and what is not within the agriculture domain.

Confusing spelling and inadequate bandwith

Moreover, confusing spelling conventions, dead links that no longer exist and inadequate bandwidth in many countries in the Global South all severely hamper the ability of practitioners to properly find information.  This means that a lot of good, available information is overlooked!  

Farmknowledge offers solutions

Farmknowledge.info circumvents the challenges outlined above. It is a powerful tool that has a unique indexing system to effectively find practical information from a wide range of recognised knowledge-based sources. Farmknowledge currently offers acces to 368 online repositories carrying 7,257 downloadable documents and 10,937 images of crops, pests and diseases. Documents and images are related to 570 crop names with 36,547 common names and synonyms, and to 17,486 pests, diseases and weeds with 78,413 related common names and synonyms. Material is auto-collected, auto-indexed, and made findable via different languages.

At the moment, Farmknowledge.info is suited to the needs of extension specialists and farmers, but ultimately it is intended to be integrated into systems that cater to research institutes, specific sector, crop, or group of farmers.

Further development

Presently the services are presented via this website. Together with our development partners in East and West Africa we are working on localised installs, focusing on crops, tools and languages for selected regions. Such local install will be available online, offline and via apps.

Should you want to join the team and/or finance further development, please drop us a mail at service@cooperativeknowledge.nl