Information flow can help farmers cope with climate change

Maybe it could be called Fieldbook, or MyField. From the Iowa State University News Service: The instant communications technology that nurtured grassroots revolutions in the Arab world could also help farmers cope with climate change, according to Iowa State University researchers.

And so the researchers - Steven Fales, a professor of agronomy; and Gene Takle, director of Iowa State's Climate Science Program, a professor of agronomy and of geological and atmospheric sciences - are organizing a symposium to explore that idea during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Feb. 16-20 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The theme of this year's meeting is "Flattening the World: Building a Global Knowledge Society."

..."This whole climate change debate has gotten to be monotonous," Fales said. "Many of us are saying it's time to forget about the naysayers and go into action, which will require adaptation and resilience."

The symposium will consider an action plan that calls for developing global systems that distribute information about crops and climate change through local networks and cell phones. Fales figures such a system would move information far more quickly than the current system of studying, discovering, publishing and then communicating to farmers via extension systems. "In these unstable climate conditions, the situation can change rapidly from season to season," Fales said.

And when the latest climate model indicates a change in growing conditions, Fales said there should be a way to quickly notify a region's farmers that wheat, for example, may be the best crop for the year.

The researchers also see information flowing back from the farmers: "The farmers' observations could be transferred back to a database so we could see trends emerging," Fales said. "And that could actually happen in the upper Midwest of the U.S. or in Uganda."...

Sunset in a field, shot by Louiza1612, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license