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Knowledge, information and data – and the social and physical infrastructures that carry them - are widely recognized as key building blocks for a more sustainable agriculture, effective agricultural science, and productive partnerships among the global research community.
This paper argues that the processes by which knowledge, information and data are generated and shared are being transformed and reinvented – especially enabled by ongoing developments in the area of information and communication technologies (ICTs) – and that these transformations provide massive opportunities for the entire Agricultural Research for Development (ARD) community to truly mobilize and apply global scientific knowledge, in ways that are hardly yet appreciated.
Catching and successfully harnessing these ‘waves’ requires strategic investments in capacities, bandwidth and infrastructure, skills, tools and applications, and the adoption of an ‘open innovation’ mindset that breaks barriers, links data and knowledge, and guarantees the public accessibility of goods generated and captured through science.
What are some of the trends and changes we can expect in the coming years?

Increasingly ‘ubiquitous’ connectivity along value chains – We will all make use of a range of devices and platforms to access and share knowledge: From the web to phones, radio, video and text messaging. Most scientists will work in knowledge-rich environments; farming communities, probably using different devices, will be far more connected than at present.
Multiple connectivity paths widen the potential reach of science.
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Increasingly ‘precise’ applications and tools – ICTs and digital signatures or labels of various types will be used to track products from producer to consumer; to monitor local soil, weather and market conditions; to tailor data and information services to the demands of a specific audience or individuals. Applications will come in many shapes and sizes, to suit even the most specialized needs.
 Increasingly ‘accessible’ data and information – Vast quantities of public data and information held by institutions and individuals will become visible and re-usable at the click of a device. More intermediary skills and applications will be needed to help harvest, make sense of, and add value to these layers of data and information.

Increasingly ‘diverse’ set of applications available across digital clouds – The digital
‘identities’ of scientists and their collaborators will give them access to a wide range of online tools and applications, accessible from any location and across different devices, enabling
1 Drafted by Ajit Maru (GFAR), Enrica Porcari CGIAR), and Peter Ballantyne. The contributions to this paper from invited participants to the Workshop on ICTs: Transforming Agriculture Science, Research and
Technology Generation at Science Forum 2009 at Wageningen, 16-17 June 2009 are gratefully acknowledged.
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collaboration across boundaries as never before. Local firewalls and server configurations conditions will not restrict global sharing.
 Increasingly ‘inter-connected’ tools and knowledge bases – Different communities and their knowledge will be able to connect and share with each other, along the research cycle and across disciplines, including people with different engagement in science such as farmers, traders, politicians. A whole new breed of products and services will emerge to inter-connect and re-present diverse knowledge.
In general, the most significant impact of ICTs on agricultural technology generation will be in connecting and engaging communities in participatory agricultural innovation. Science will be able to come out of its ‘silos.’ New agricultural processes and technologies to solve agricultural problems will emerge through continuous innovation with user communities, thus eliminating many of the constraints that agricultural science, research and technology generation now face. The need for conventional extension from research stations to farmers’ fields will diminish. Agricultural innovations will best fit the needs of user communities.
What are some of the changes needed to move in these directions? These include:
1.
Improve communications infrastructure and bandwidth, investing in lower-cost hardware, software and applications that connect science right along the development chain.
2.
Increase and improve formal education and training in information and communication sciences that contributes to innovation in the use of new ICTs in agriculture.
3.
Extend the generation and dissemination of data and information content as a ‘public good’ that is widely accessible and is licensed to be easily re-used and applied.
4.
Support applications that integrate data and information or foster the interoperability of applications and information systems, allowing safe and ethical access while protecting necessary rights.
5.
Encourage the effective uptake and use of data, information and knowledge, particularly focusing on capacity building dimensions necessary for the outputs of science to have impacts.
6.
Support innovation in the workflows, processes and tools used to create, share, publish, visualize, and connect the outputs of agricultural science and the people engaged in it.
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Frontiers in ICTs
Advances in Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Biology in the late 19 th Century and early 20th
Centuries laid the foundations that opened avenues for even greater advances in applied sciences such as electronics, computing, systems analysis, software engineering and molecular biology in the mid
20th Century. Progress in applied sciences has led to new technologies such as bio and nano technology, information and communications technology and new materials technologies in the late
20 th and early 21 st Century that has not only produced innovative products and processes for unimaginable progress by humankind to what it is today but also contributed to furthering science and research.
Along with these advances were significant changes in the systems and institutions of science. The pursuit of science and research became widespread as a public responsibility and open to public, albeit of the formally educated section of the Society. The future holds promise for further human progress through application of science and possibly even more changes in the institutions of science to include every human being in scientific endeavours and innovation.
This paper briefly traces some advances in information and communications technologies and forecasts how it might in the future have an impact upon agricultural research, innovation, and agricultural development in general.
Hardware and Connectivity
The Moore’s law that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit is growing exponentially, the number of transistors doubling approximately every two years, has so far held. The same law can be applied to processing speeds of microprocessors, memory capacity and the number of pixels that a digital camera can process. Memory storage capacities in magnetic and optical media have also increased exponentially and solid state drives are already commercialised. Connectivity between computers and through the Internet has similarly increased in bandwidth. The rates at which data can be transmitted, both within buildings and across long distances, grows without apparent limit and ever reducing costs. Parallel and Grid computing has demonstrated huge potentials of processing power available for use on the desktop of an average computer user and this will be multiplied many folds with memristors (already prototyped), photonic and quantum computers (still in the research phase). We are seeing a boom in handheld devices that interface with existing systems.
Ubiquitous Telecommunication Infrastructure
Flowing from the falling costs of all things digital, there has been a steady flow of investment into communications infrastructure around the world. Cell phone and broadband (wired and wireless)
Internet networks carrying both voice and data are being deployed in even the poorest countries, and with time will expand to cover most rural areas. These systems are sophisticated and manageable by both private and public entities, allowing agriculture and agricultural research to increasingly take communications for granted and being continuously improving in the years ahead.
Utility or "Cloud" Computing
The combination of progress in computing hardware, system software, and Internet communications has now enabled the construction of general-purpose data centres that can be reconfigured by command to support any software application in minutes. There are already data services that allow a user to have hundreds or thousands of computers at their command, and yet pay for them by the hour or minute, without owning or operating the hardware themselves. The costs are far less than even falling hardware prices would suggest, since the cost of the data centre can be shared among many
"bursty" users. In effect, the data centre acts like a utility, providing as much computing as requested at just the times when needed. Since these data centres are invariably shared over the Internet, they are
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sometimes called computing "in the cloud." These "cloud" data centres are the natural repository for shared data sets, so that users in any location or institution can instantly access, analyze and interpret public information goods without the need to move the data to their own facilities. This can enable a researcher in any location to work with data as well as any other researcher, which can lead to new kinds of collaboration and new sources of project direction.
Software and Content Management
A far more important frontier achieved through more complex processors, processing speeds, memory capacity and connectivity has been the development of agents, sensors and devices such as radio frequency identification tags (RFIDs) that is now reshaping how humans work and interact creating huge potentials in terms of how we can mediate share and extract value from information and knowledge. Among the others, the semantic web and its related techniques and applications (e.g. ontologies) are currently working in this sense, trying to re-shape machine-to-machine interaction and the way computers retrieve, manage and share knowledge on the web.
The science of pragmatics – the practical interpretation and use of signs by agents or communities within particular circumstances and contexts - and going beyond conventional semantics, is now allowing ICTs to be used in much more supportive ways. This has been demonstrated in diverse areas such as health, scientific research and business management in modelling, simulation, forecasting and visualization and has implications for agriculture. These potentials bring new challenges on how we understand this new pervasive computing landscape and how we can make use of collective and distributed form of intelligence.
Interaction with Biology
The interaction of ICT with biology, biotechnology, nanotechnology and new materials is enabling the development of high quality information that is created from diverse entities and sources and which is self organizing. This self-organizing collective intelligence – living information – presents new frontiers in effective use and application. Continuous advances in ICT and biology are enabling developments where the relationship between these two disciplines faces a paradigm shift; from ICTs that mimic biology to ICT that use biology for information processing. Progress in synthetic biology – the study of the design and building of novel biological functions and systems – is bringing progress in systematic design methodologies and manufacturing processes. The potential of interfacing ICT with biological systems at the micro/nano scale is now emerging.
Biotechnology, Nanotechnology, Materials Science and ICTs
It can be argued even with current knowledge that in future Bio- and Nano- technology, Material
Sciences and ICTs together will define the core direction of agricultural science, research and technology by having impact on plant and animal breeding and improvement, agricultural production systems, risk management and aversion, sustainable use of natural resources, protecting the environment and agricultural market chains and in agricultural innovation in general.
Analytical Framework for ICTs in Agriculture and Agricultural Science
ICTs and Agricultural Production
An area of application for ICTs is in improving, through better management, the efficiency and sustainability in using inputs - land, soil nutrients, feed and fodder, water, energy, pesticides, labour and most importantly, information and knowledge - in agriculture. ICTs also help reduce the negative effects of pests and disease and enable aversion and mitigation of risks such as from inclement weather, droughts, floods and long term change in climate. Through innovation, ICTs continue to contribute to improving throughput of farming systems, increasing the quantity, quality and
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marketability of outputs (e.g. food, energy and biomaterials), supporting their marketing and enabling their effective and efficient consumption by households and communities and their ultimate recycling.
ICTs helped pave the way for consumers to decide which products they can ‘responsibly’ purchase, which seem to have higher food miles, and those whose production and safety can be traced all the way back to the fishpond.
For the small, resource poor farmer and producers in economically developing countries, these applications of ICTs have not yet become mainstream. The economic returns from agriculture and access to affordable technology useful in small farms operations are the main constraints in more widespread use of ICTs in small holder agricultural production.
ICTs and Agricultural Science, Research and Technology Generation
The current application of ICTs in agricultural science, research and technology generation can be clustered around:

Data Collection – Enabling collection of agricultural and environmental data from biological and environmental sources, with or without human interaction. The data is subsequently analysed and manipulated in order to feed auxiliary applications or to carry out studies.
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Number Crunching - Enabling management, sharing and processing of large datasets, modelling and simulation, image processing and visualization that contributes to plant and animal breeding and improvement, bioinformatics, agricultural meteorology, plant, animal and zoonotic diseases epidemiology, farming systems research, market chain analysis and management etc.
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Geo-spatial applications – Enabling data and information related to geography and space to be managed, processed and visualized and contributing to land and water use planning, natural resources utilization, agricultural input supply and commodity marketing, poverty and hunger mapping etc.
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Decision Support and Knowledge based systems and robotics – Enabling data and information to be organized with added experiences of experts to contribute to mimic, multiply and use expertise especially in searching information and data semantically, diagnosis and farm and agricultural process automation

Embedded ICTs in Farm equipment and processes (Agrionics) – Enabling greater efficiencies in farm equipment and agricultural processes and in what is termed “precision agriculture” as also in agricultural products transport and marketing such as the use RFIDs,
Wireless Internet and Cellular Telephony in labelling, traceability and identity preservation
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Connecting Communities and Enabling Learning – Using ICTs to connect communities such as of farmers, researchers and all connected to agriculture and its practice. ICTs are already playing a significant role in connecting scientists and researchers in agriculture to communicate to each other and in scientific and technical publications. Use of ICTs to connect farmers and producers to new agricultural knowledge and technology and in problem resolution have been tested and found very useful so much so that ICTs are now considered to be transforming agricultural extension. ICTs, through enabling access to text, graphics, audio and video objects in an integrated manner have also helped education systems, by broadening access to learning and by improving the quality of the classroom experience.
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ICTs and Agricultural Innovation
The progress in hardware, software, connectivity and integration of computing systems enables new forms of data gathering; both human assisted and automated. It is bringing new capacities for processing data and information dissemination. In future, this process of connecting communities to new knowledge and information is likely to accelerate with advanced technologies which bring far greater processing powers, robust, reliable, storage capacity and connectivity.
This progress will also enable new forms of participatory science and research, extension and learning to those within agricultural communities who are not yet included in these processes. Extension, as it is understood now as being “linear” from research to farmer through extension agents will be as in a network with pluralistic sources as well as users of information and knowledge Learning will be ubiquitously available and pervasive for all in an agricultural community. It will change the realm of agricultural science, where it will not be only the formally educated scientists who bring new technological innovations but whole communities who do so. All within an agricultural community will be producers and consumers of information and innovations.
The analytical framework to be considered for discussions during the Science Forum is illustrated in
Figure 1 (next page).
The framework indicates the interconnection between basic sciences, applied sciences, information and communications development and its linkages with agricultural science, research and technology generation.
Available ICTs tools are usually adapted to meet the needs of agricultural research. Therefore the scope of using ICTs for agricultural science, research and technology generation can be construed to initiate at this level. The use of these tools leads to specific applications for agriculture research such as geographical systems, development of knowledge based systems, decision support system, models etc. Used by innovators and scientists, these applications lead to new technologies such as seeds or strategies for water management.
ICTs, as described above, can also enable connecting agricultural communities and it is envisage that these connected communities will practice science and lead agricultural innovation. Community participated, driven and led agricultural innovation through extensive use of ICTs will lead to new technologies such as seeds and animals customised to meet the specific needs of particular communities, participatory watershed management, participatory plant and animal pest and disease monitoring and surveillance etc.
Participatory Watershed Management can bring greater equity in water use and effective use of water collectively at the watershed level. Participatory disease surveillance can improve disease management and prevention offsetting many of the current approaches that devastate entire agricultural communities economically such as used in foot and mouth disease control in Europe or Avian Flu world wide.
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Figure 1: Framework for ICT use for Agricultural Innovation
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Development Impact of ICTs in Agriculture and Agricultural Science
Impact of ICTs through information and knowledge sharing and learning
The primary impact of information and communication science and technology on agriculture as indicated above will be through management of information and sharing of knowledge in agricultural communities.
Vast amounts of data and information related to agriculture and linked temporally and geo-spatially will provide a huge potential for learning and new knowledge when accessed by communities and individuals equitably across the world. For example, many of the solutions/adaptation options needed to cope with the effects of climate change are available when the range of ecologies and climates in which agriculture is already practised is considered. What is needed to develop specific solutions for individual communities is to model social, political and economic data with the biophysical, meteorological and agronomic data around a crop, cropping, production and farming systems. This capacity in some ways already exists but in the next decade and after it will certainly increase many folds, enabling communities to model and arrive at local solutions using global inputs, experience, knowledge, skills and technologies.
In practice this will enable communities to develop customised seeds or animals that are unique to their needs having considered access to inputs, throughputs of the cropping, farming systems and marketability or preferences of their clients for the products they produce. It will also allow tailoring farming systems to meet specific needs of customers as also meet emerging societal and ethical requirements such as for food safety, sustainable use of natural resources, “green” energy use, humane production etc.
An important outcome of improved information management and knowledge sharing coupled with global data access, processing capacities and visualization will be in more accurate and precise modelling of market chains as it will allow large numbers of variables to be included in these models.
This will in turn improve market chain efficiencies and provide more equitable remuneration to all in the market supply chain. Improved market chain efficiencies will contribute to energy saving, reduced green house gas generation and emission, enable efficient carbon sequestration by customizing cropping patterns and areas, reduce costs and improve quality.
ICTs embedded in agricultural processes, tools and machinery
Information and communications technologies embedded in agricultural processes, tools and machinery will reduce energy utilization and costs, improve quality, change time in production and reduce intensity of human labour, especially in farming and post harvest processing. Equipment, such as water pumps and sprayers, will lower energy use and reduce wastage if embedded with ad hoc
ICTs. Sensors embedded in soils will monitor and control use of water and soil nutrients. GPS enabled sprayers will improve pesticide applications and reduce their hazards.
The reduction in human labour through the use of ICTs will liberate huge numbers of low paid workers, mainly women and children. They will enable use of their labour in more productive and higher paying occupations and enable children opportunities for education and progress.
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Realising the Potential of ICTs in Agriculture and Agricultural Science
Compared to the frontiers of ICT science now being achieved and the application of ICTs in areas such as human health and business enterprise, the application in agriculture and agricultural science may be considered to significantly lagging behind.
The use and application of ICTs in agriculture, sometimes termed e-agriculture, is not yet a recognized discipline but is pursued as an adjunct to other agricultural disciplines, such as in plant breeding through bioinformatics and in agronomy and soil sciences through the use of Geographical
Information Systems (GIS). Some technologically advanced countries have used sensors, devices and robotics in their agriculture and in agricultural science, particularly for high-value crops.
The current state of ICT use in agricultural development calls for significant structural change in agricultural science systems and institutions so as to mainstream and embed ICTs and use them extensively in agricultural innovation, similar to what is being done for biotechnology. This has to be initiated with changes in agricultural curricula in Universities that teach the applications of ICTs, including training to use ICT tools in research, education and extension and fostering research in ICT use and application in agricultural science, innovation and technology generation. ICT use in agriculture and agricultural development as a distinct area of research is not yet recognized in a majority of agricultural research institutes. This needs to be corrected and entailed with appropriate organizational structures that nurture application of ICTs for agricultural innovation and technology generation.
The Internet, with its rapid progress towards social inter-activeness and enabling data and information to be contributed and accessed universally, as a system brings all the advances in ICTs and the science behind the technology to the forefront. With the convergence of all kinds of ICTs such as radio, TV, telephony, audio, photo and videography, the Internet will continue to emerge as the core universal information and communication system. For agricultural development, recognition of the role of the
Internet and of convergence of all ICTs towards enabling integrated data and information access through “mixed” media is imperative by all its actors and stakeholders.
The new arrangements needed for the effective and efficient use of advances in information and communications sciences and ICTs require the following:
1.
Improve communications infrastructure and bandwidth, investing in lower-cost hardware, software and applications that connect science right along the development chain.
2.
Increase and improve formal education and training in information and communication sciences that contributes to innovation in the use of new ICTs in agriculture.
3.
Extend the generation and dissemination of data and information content as a ‘public good’ that is widely accessible and is licensed to be easily re-used and applied.
4.
Support applications that integrate data and information or foster the interoperability of applications and information systems, allowing safe and ethical access while protecting necessary rights.
5.
Encourage the effective uptake and use of data, information and knowledge, particularly focusing on capacity building dimensions necessary for the outputs of science to have impacts.
6.
Support innovation in the workflows, processes and tools used to create, share, publish, visualize, and connect the outputs of agricultural science and the people engaged in it.
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It is apparent from this list that a considerable infusion of investments is urgently needed, in order to foster an effective and efficient use of information through use of ICTs for agricultural development.
These investments will largely be made by the public sector or through public-private partnerships.
Two distinct type of investments are required; the first that improves the use of information and ICTs generally such as in health, education and governance and which will also contribute to rural and agricultural development and the second, specific for agriculture focusing on information content generation, access and effective use.
For these investments, a significant effort would be required through advocacy and capacity development. Institutional and donor support in these areas is rarely forthcoming and needs to be corrected.
To cope with all the diversity, there is an emerging need for a set of institutions with agreed standards, norms, rules and regulations to govern and guide the flow of information related to agriculture and ensure its equitable access through the Internet.
There already are multi-actor efforts such as the Coherence in Information for Agricultural research for Development (CIARD) Initiative, the ontology and standards activities of the Food and
Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), as well as the ‘Agricultural Research for
Development Web Ring’ and the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR) Information and
Communications Management (ICM) for ARD Initiatives that attempt to provide an institutional backbone to ICM for agricultural research and development.
Nevertheless, this institution building needs to be extended to include the scientific professional bodies so as to standardize data collection and aggregation as also processing, promoting availability and access. At the International level, the FAO and the CGIAR have a significant role in framing the
Institutional arrangements for improving and governing information flows for agricultural development. GFAR can be a platform for a global dialogue and action on this issue of governance of information flows. The CGIAR has an important role to play as creator and curator of much of the essential data and information needed, also as connector between different science communities seeking development impact.
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