Schmitz, J.G. (2001). "Agricultural Information Systems."
Proceedings of the India Soy Forum. Ed., P. Bhatnagar. SOPA: Indore

The Web is the largest and richest “agricultural information system” in the world. Its massive holdings, covering all aspects of world agricultural, natural resource, and food systems, enable farmers to locate needed information to improve yields, plan for weather contingencies, access research, calculate treatments and runoff, simulate the growing season, visualize precision data, manage finances, buy inputs and sell outputs, and monitor prices in local as well as world markets. Of course, much remains to be done to insure that farmers worldwide can access and locate reliable Web resources.

The Web is surely the most promising way for Extension services to reach more farmers with better services. A brief historical review may put this claim in context. In the United States, the Land Grant Universities were established to teach and do research in agriculture and practical arts and to disseminate this knowledge to the citizens. The demands of a dedicated outreach mission to rural areas made them early adopters of the latest technologies to deliver quality print and media content to citizens. In the mid-1930’s, when radio was king, there were “Schools of the Air.” A 1930’s broadcast by UI featured Extension content and music of the student marching band.  A 1950’s TV delivery strategy was to beam programs from a Purdue University airplane flying figure-eight patterns above northern Indiana.

Land Grants embraced Internet technology equally fast. A 1993 Gopher site at UIUC provided timely disaster relief information on the Mississippi flood. But at the same time a new Internet protocol called HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), created by Tim Berners-Lee of CERN in Switzerland, brought the Web into being. A hypertext allows a user to go from any point in a text to any other point, but Berners-Lee’s invention was a networked hypertext of any document or media clip anywhere in the world, assuming the document references the HTTP protocol, uses the Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML), and is properly addressed and stored on a Web server. Remarkably, Berners-Lee created it originally to allow physics researchers to share documents with colleagues around the world. He met this goal and a bit more; he also created the most explosive new medium of communication since typesetting.  An explosion of hits to Berners' Lee's World-Wide Web occurred soon after.  The 1993 release of  Mosaic by NCSA ( National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois) caused a rapid, exponential scaling of Internet usage.

Extension too used this latest and greatest technology as a chance to add value to existing outreach programs, forge new kinds of programs, and reach more citizens. The “brochure rack” went online first, followed more recently by decision tools, databases, spatial data, and more. At first, sceptics downplayed the role of the Web in Extension, but now many sceptics are converts. In retrospect, this is not surprising.

Early Web projects were rapid prototypes in the best sense, illuminating the potential of a new technology. In 1994, NCSA Founder Larry Smarr asked local farmers, agribusiness professionals, and University of Illinois staff to use Mosaic and the Web to build a digital agricultural network, itself to be part of an overall digital community called CCnet (Champaign County Network). An extensive system of hot lists in Cyberfarm provided farmers the chance to easily locate agricultural Web sites in the county, such as Illini FS and Frito-Lay. Online transactions were tested between farmer and elevator, making Cyberfarm effectively the first B2B for agriculture. Cyberfarm also included two of the first farmer’s home pages on the Web.

Stratsoy, the first major commodity portal, soon followed Cyberfarm. Substantial funding by the national United Soybean Board and state Illinois Soybean Board helped make the project a great success.  Expert FAQs, tool suites, and pricing information have proved very popular. The evaluation efforts of Stratsoy have produced useful findings: publications mentioning the site lead to an increase in hits, which further increase with the addition or freshness of information. Also, the FAQ system helped show how faculty could efficiently answer and archive questions.

But it is the more recent projects that have really silenced the critics. For example, the Illinois Agronomy Handbook now has a companion Web site that offers extensive decision aids, databases, and full text chapters.  One tool—the Agriweather Toolbench—is notable for its database of Illinois climate information covering approximately the last 100 years, based on nearly 100 different reporting stations, supporting predictions for the growing season and localized to the farmer’s area. If this system had been used last year, widespread predictions of an early drought may have been tempered by the projection given by the toolbench (for many Illinois locations). The toolbench also predicts growth stages of corn and of common pests.  Other decision aids support seeding rate, soil fertility treatments, optimal feed ratio, and Integrated Pest Management. Javascript coding allows the developers to create a decision aid from any formula presented in printed books and even allows users to store input via “cookies.” Selected databases and decision tools are also provided over the wireless Web for cell phones and related wireless devices.

IPM Online is a sister project to the Agronomy Handbook and offers a wealth of information on the identification and management of pests in field or garden, including high quality video optimized for the user’s connection speed. Especially important are their Crop Development and Pest Management newsletters, previously available by subscription only and now free on the Web every week, with detailed scouting reports from across the state.

Map Illinois for Watersheds is another recent example of what the Web can do for Extension.  This site provides Web-based access to GIS (Global Information System) data through the browser window. In the past, GIS data could be viewed only within proprietary software. Then ESRI (the leading GIS software company in the world) created their ARCIMS software that serves GIS data over the Web. With this capability came the chance to combine in one place spatial data holdings of disparate state and federal agencies, and allow the data to be manipulated by the user: hydrology, land cover vegetation, topological maps, digital maps of soil type, and even climate data. This project has been so successful that it will soon expand to include many other spatial data layers of interest to farmers, agribusiness, and the public, such as maps of producers, processors, and consumers of specialty crops.

FARM.DOC is a popular site for viewing expert information on grain markets and other commodities. One unique feature of FARM.DOC is that tools are in the form of downloadable Excel spreadsheets, since this functionality cannot yet be provided over the Web, save for expensive and slow-to-download Java applets.

These examples of Extension uses of the Web came with a significant price tag. The projects came into being almost entirely due to substantial temporary funding. In the past three years, several million dollars have been dedicated by CFAR (Illinois Council on Food and Agricultural Research) to jumpstart the development of practical, interactive Web resources for farmers. This funding allowed faculty and Extension staff to concentrate on prototyping, testing and final production of outreach content. The sustainability of projects after the CFAR funding runs out remains a key concern, but one can expect Extension nation-wide to increasingly build Web-based outreach--including the CFAR funded projects--into operating budgets formerly dedicated to the standard delivery technologies of print, radio, TV or CD-ROM. It is important to note that CFAR's yearly funding for IT is just a small portion of the $15M CFAR adds to existing federal and state agricultural expenditures. CFAR is now a model for a national attempt to boost agriculture research budgets nation-wide.

Merging the above projects into integrated farm management systems is a key priority. Citizens have told us that they desire one-stop shopping for needed information. They do not want to search for sites and enter long addresses, or surf over to separate sites to find needed resources. Such feedback is the impetus for the planned FARM.edu project: an integrated, cross-disciplinary farm management system over the Web that targets small to medium-sized farmers. Another key goal of FARM.edu is to help integrate Extension resources at partner Land Grants and break the artificial state boundary barrier. One anticipated component of the system is a midwestern agronomy handbook that accommodates regional differences in crops, growing conditions, and recommendations. Also planned is a seamless, multi-state digital library of crop science and natural resource publications from participating institutions. Other elements include a corn and soybean variety selection tool that combines variety-testing results from institutions into a comprehensive database of variety testing results, and a nutrient management tool covering all aspects of fertilizer applications. Field-level support is an important goal of the system, allowing farmers to view and manipulate precision agriculture data about their own operations. More ambitious is the planned simulation capability. A crop simulator would model alternative planting scenarios. Land management simulation would project the effects of crop rotation, fertilizer amounts, pesticides, planting methods, and run-off on the land. Another decidedly blue-sky element--but already being tested with John Deere and Case rigs--is robot tractors, controlled over the Web.

These Web-based Extension projects represent a reasonably broad range of topics and disciplines, but Extension at Illinois and around the country has just begun to build all that needs to be built. Other specialties of Extension (youth development, consumer finance, etc.) must catch up to Extension’s great successes in supporting farmers over the Web. The hope is that a broad range of decision tools and databases will be available for these specialties too. At that time we really will have a full test of the claim that the Web will be the most important delivery tool for Extension.

No doubt it is clear to Extension workers in the US that, regardless of problems, the Web is a new tool for dissemination of practical information to farmers, families, and other clients. How far it will penetrate in the US—and how far it will penetrate in India— is yet to be seen.

            Significant comparisons in mission and approach can be drawn between US and Indian efforts to reach rural farmers over the Web. Internet access terminals are being provided at more and more locations for walk-up use.  For example, the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation has created “village knowledge centers” in Pondicherry. Other internet access sites are present or planned in KVK’s and other bricks and mortar endpoints. A great deal of practical information for farmers is being posted for access at such walk-up sites. The Babhaleshwar KVK web site—maintained by the Pravara Institute and the Indian Council on Agricultural Research (ICAR)—is a highly developed example.

             Media employed in US sites are similarly used in Indian Web design, such as the use of Flash animation by the superb and exemplary TARAhaat site. From such examples it is evident that, as India emerges as one of the leading IT economies in the world—with especially rich activity ongoing in hi-tech hubs like Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad—there are few problems finding highly talented programmers to create Web-based Extension sites.

              Publicly and privately created agricultural portals in India are quite similar in scope and services to those in the US, and have proliferated in the past year. These include Khetibaadi, India Agronet, Kisan, Krishiworld, Krishi Udyog, and AgriWatch.  The Agricultural Gateway to India (AGI) is a public portal created by Dr. Sandhya Shenoy, Senior Scientist at NAARM. AGI provides a broad selection of resources including multi-lingual audio descriptions of rice varieties. 

              In a related vein, “community portals” are popular in India.  In describing the approach of his Soya Chapaul project, Sivakumar (2000) says the farmer asks for four main things: knowledge of farm practices, accurate weather information for planning operations, pricing information that helps them buy inputs low, and pricing information to help sell yields high. Soya Chapaul supports these goals by in effect integrating Extension with the marketplace into a virtual village. In fact, a key difference between US and India is the strongly community-centered, participatory approach of Indian sites like this. The US has seen its share of participatory research and related efforts, but this approach seems to be especially fundamental to the way many of the Indian Web sites—and Extension—do business. Also, a significant slant toward women can be clearly seen, as is displayed at the Tarahaat site. Women play a central role in production farming and acquisition of related technical information in India, and a variety of Extension efforts are geared to them.

              It is interesting to reflect on the growing role of private Indian sites such as Soya Chaupul. When the Internet and Web were first opened to citizen and business users in the US, academic users became concerned about the proliferation of AOL and dot-com sites. What we did not foresee was the rich content and synergies of communication that emerge. The Web has been energized by having been opened up, as is in evidence in sites like Chaupal. An open Web is a good deal for all.  Extension is helped in their outreach mission by Web sites of the commodity groups and agribusiness (and not incidentally by their funding).

              There is a remaining problem, however, for which both private and public sites are too frequently responsible. Needed content is too often locked behind password boxes or sold at a fee. Even at Land Grant Universities with dedicated Extension missions, the demands of cost recovery slow down or block the dissemination of traditional print publications to the Web. A related and unfortunate trend is the password protecting of course Web pages, allowing only registered students to view sites. In the earlier days of the Web, lecture notes were often freely available to citizens. More recently, Extension content like the Agronomy Handbook site has been used in college and high school agronomy courses. Surely it is ideal when content does double-duty of this kind, serving both students and citizens. It is worth observing that the digital divide is not just a chasm between the connected and the unconnected. Once connected, the next chasm is between those that can pay to access content and those that cannot. It is a tragedy when a citizen seeks basic existing knowledge on the Web without success.

             Another problem is that, even if content is posted, it is not always posted according to standards overseen by the World-Wide Web Consortium and related policy bodies. For the Web to provide an agricultural information system in a strong sense, it is not enough to just have content “up”. It must also be created in a format to make it as universally accessible as possible.  By following such standards, we would have in our future a distributed digital library of text, data, decision tools and media dedicated to helping farmers worldwide. This is what the Internet and Web were meant to be.

             A related problem is the continuing “browser war” between Netscape and Internet Explorer.  Web designers and users around the world wish the browsers would support a common set of standards so everyone can get on with their business. Ironically, both browsers came from the same “seed”-- the Mosaic browser--but both went on to legislate their own standards. This insured that web pages designed for one browser would be incompatible with the other. Internet Explorer was the worst violator in their largely successful effort to become the monopoly browser.

             Obviously we cannot make all Web-based content for agriculture free, but we can ensure that the most important resources for farming are easily available, targeting those that need it most. Individuals and organizations can restrict access to what they must restrict, but hopefully will provide access to some content as a public service.

             Knowledge of farming is fundamental knowledge, especially in a world with billions of malnourished people.  Farming knowledge is surely a “global public good” in the same sense that germplasm produced by the remarkable CYMMIT effort is a global  public good.. The worldwide agriculture community—be it academic, non-profit, or private—must provide more open content. The more open content that is contributed, the richer our world “agricultural information system” will become.

            Federal and state governments, universities, non-profit organizations and agribusinesses in the US have an historic opportunity to create open content for agriculture and agricultural education. So too in India.  So too around the world. In spite of present limitations, the future is before us and that future is on the Web.

Bibliography

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Hoeft, R., & Nafziger, E. (2001). Illinois Agronomy Handbook. University of Illinois Extension.

Mashelkar, R.A. (1999). Economics of Knowledge. 16th Deshmukh Memorial Lecture, India International Centre, New Dehli, India. 

Nwoha, J. (2001). "Empirical Analysis of StratSoy Use: Changes in Uses and Users Over Time Using Statistics from the Web Site." Ph.D.Dissertation, Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, The University of Illinois.

Schmitz, J. (2001). "Digital Libraries and Web-Based Training." In B. Khan (Ed)., Web-Based Training, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.

Schmitz, J. & Hewes, C. (1996). “Agriculture on the Web: Future of the Cyberfarm.” Proceedings of Information Agriculture 1996. Potash and Phosphate Institute: Atlanta, GA.

Sivakumar, S. (2000). “Soya Chaupal: An Integrated Concept as a Model Solution.” SAARC Oils and Fats Today.

Wells, H.G. (1937). “The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia.” In World Brain. Methuen: London.

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