Agriculture

Alvin Tamsir and Karsten Temme of Pivot Bio, Inc. in the U.S. will use a synthetic gene regulation system to transfer a nitrogen-fixing gene cluster from naturally occurring bacteria into agricultural crops. These engineered crops could capture and metabolize nitrogen from the atmosphere, reducing the need for petrochemical fertilizers and reducing the cost of farming in developing countries.

Andre Proctor of Keystone Accountability in the United Kingdom will develop a system to collect and organize feedback directly from farmers to support African agricultural development decisions. They will design affordable mobile data collection methods to gather feedback using verbal and written surveys. This will be coupled with a modified open web-based processing system to generate accurate and quantifiable performance data on agricultural programs and technologies for use by African agriculture development institutions.

Rastislav Ivanic of Oliver's Planet, Inc. in the U.S. will develop their online platform using SMS to crowd source expertise from the developing world's rural farmers in order to better design and execute agricultural initiatives and promote their funding. The platform will collect simple statements by SMS directly from the farmers without charge on possible solutions to relevant problems, and use them to build feasible and supported solutions. These possible solutions will then be sent back to the farmers for them to rate.

Evelyne Kiptot from the World Agroforestry Centre in Kenya will evaluate whether television programs can teach innovative agricultural practices to dairy farmers, and whether mobile phones can be used to measure their performance. Rural farmers in sub-Saharan Africa have traditionally been told about improved farming practices in person, which is expensive and has limited coverage. They will film a series of four television programs in the field and air them on a popular TV station in Kenya.

Steff Deprez of Vredeseilanden in Belgium will develop an approach utilizing pattern detection software (SenseMaker) to translate feedback from smallholder farmers directly into quantitative data that can be easily queried by agricultural development program managers and evaluators. They will test their approach on rice, passion fruit and coffee smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan African to evaluate whether they should be included in modern markets.

Lesley Drake of Imperial College London in the United Kingdom will develop a mobile phone-based platform to increase the participation of smallholder farmers in the Kenyan government's homegrown school meals program. The technology will enable schools to report their food requirements, and the Ministry to advertise tenders to registered sellers including smallholder farmers, all via mobile phone. This approach will lower the cost of making school feeding contracts and make the process transparent, as well as providing a new market for local farmers.

Adam Abramson from Foundations for Farming in Zimbabwe will develop a low-cost mobile phone platform to encourage local farmers to directly engage with each other and with local organizations to share their experiences and provide feedback. The platform is installed on feature phones and allows the formation of 'buddy' chat groups. They will further develop the software, and evaluate its ability to promote the adoption of a novel farming technique by conducting a randomized controlled trial in 72 sites across Zimbabwe.

Johnathan Dalzell of Queen's University Belfast in the United Kingdom will improve food crop productivity particularly for small hold subsistence farmers by reducing the losses caused by pathogenic nematode worms, which are estimated to cost around $125 billion per year globally. These pathogenic worms absorb small proteins called neuropeptides from their external environment directly into their central nervous system, which can influence their movement and sensory behavior. They will exploit this process to destroy the worms.

Gregorio Hueros of Universidad de Alcala in Spain will engineer maize kernels to increase the expression of anti-fungal genes in the transfer cell layer, which transports nutrients and protects filial tissues in the adjacent growing seeds. This could boost the ability of these cells to protect the grain against invasion by pathogens such as mycotoxin-producing fungi.

Steven Kelly of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom proposes to genetically engineer a benign parasite as a biological control mechanism against herbivorous insect pests. When extracted from a cassava leaf by a feeding insect pest, the parasite expresses the insecticide and thus acts to control pest levels. This biological control agent would target only the insect pests, and could require only a one-time distribution, an important consideration in developing countries.