Making Agriculture Cool

Bankelele writes:

Courtesy of Cityfarmer

The urban population does not grow food, has little interest in agriculture. They want to make live in cities (like Nairobi which generates over ½ the country’s GDP) and build applications for mobile phones that do A, B, C, D etc. One way to increase interest is to agriculture relevant to a young population, farmers employing new techniques new crops, not just traditional maize and beans.
In the technology space, there has been a shift, deliberate or not towards rewarding innovations and projects in the field of agriculture including:
- Apps for Africa was won by i-cow a voice-based mobile phone application that helps dairy farmers manage breeding and feeding of cows leading to better yields.
- The Chase Bank /Enablis Business Plan competition in which agri-business proposals overtook ICT both in the number of entries received and list of top 100 picked. Of these 35% of the entries submitted came from Nairobi and 30# were from people aged 18 – 25 years.
- Finally M-farm, an information resource for farmers scooped the top prize in last week’s IPO48 entrepreneur contest.
The best way to make agriculture cool is for it to make money, but by also making agriculture relevant for the youth - using best practices, new technology, and high profits (tea sector),

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