Crop-planning, making smarter agriculture with climate data

Agriculture has an important tradition in Latin America and large areas have maintained stable conditions for decades with constant practices and yield. Planning processes in those areas have not suffered any change for years and some countries like Colombia have not modified its rural policies in the last three of four decades; on the other hand, natural and environmental conditions have changed dramatically in the last years as a consequence of climate change and climate variability modifying established practices for traditional crops. Since farmers have suffered several effects on its production process they have realized the importance of supporting future actions on reliable climate data, scientific development have also grown in last decades and planning offices are looking for better practices, today´ scientists and planning offices are trying to link all this reality in a new paradigm called “Climate Smart Agriculture”. The Research program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security - CCAFS follows this interest of linking its research results with open data sources, software developers and Latin American problems therefore in 2014 they performed a hackathon in Lima to develop new applications that help farmers to support their decision on scientific information. “Crop-planning” is one product designed and developed at CCAFS´s hackathon conceived as a worldwide platform for sharing and sowing crop calendars and agro-climate data, it compiles open dataset like historical production, land cover, local climate conditions and integrates an interface for crowdsourced collection of dates of agricultural activities, it is designed to offer easy access to relevant data and updated crop calendars from farmers and also share management practices from local authorities. Although it is farmer oriented, principal users are technical assistants that deal with the application and share knowledge with farmers, they will use their ex- erience to warranty knowledge management and overcome technical difficulties of web and mobile platforms in rural areas.