Facilitated by: @julietnpn
First Speakers: @ElizabethVaughan, @AmberS, @JenniferByrne, @hwittman, @Lisa.ro, @Courtney, @kirsten, @jesustorres, Serena Xu
Post notes below!
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Here are my notes:
What is appropriate digital technology?
Elizabeth (CAFF advocates for 8000 family farmers): What makes digital tech appropriate for small farms? What are the big gaps?
People, place, culture matter for these questions, so let’s keep that in mind.
Challenges: #1 capital & infrastructure
#2 access to water
#3 access to land
#4 surviving extreme weather events
#5 business viability and uplift farm cooperatives
Reasons farmers acquire tech: reduce labor demand, increase productivity
What do you use to track farm tasks? Nothing, pad & pencil, or spreadsheets
What makes digital rech appropriate? Affordable, appropriately scaled, easy to use, low risk, dev is multi-beneficial
What are the biggest tech gaps? That’s a hammer and nail question, so instead ask how the farmer would phrase this.
Amber (Open Food Network): How well do online market places currently serve the needs for diverse farmers?
Sometimes tools are not very intuitive and people need support in understanding and operating them.
Feedback mechanisms are needed and implementation of that feedback, so that users are encouraged to keep using the tools.
The tools have to be a higher value than the time investment they require.
Other uses, e.g. if they want to go for an organic certification, how can they easily pull out the information they need for that.
Jennifer (White river NRCD): What does appropriate digital tech mean within a regional conservation district context?
How can digital tools help local farmers access conservation resources?
Most farmers are highly reliant on government programs. They have to re-apply every year, no guarantees.
The tools of those don’t talk to each other, and they are hard to use. Many farmers don’t have reliable internet access and are not tech savvy.
High burden on supporting staff - 7-10 tools to upload essentially the same data, and that’s depressing.
They are trying to get money out the door but there are so many hurdles. For example, this year grant contracts didn’t get out until August.
Most of the reasons had to do with technology and IRA.
One example was a single server in Kansas being responsible for holding all, so staff came to the office at crazy hours to do their work and had to repeat it.
There could be one integrated tool instead of so many, and to get the money out early.
Hannah (Lite Farm, UnivBC): What might exit to community look like in an agricultural tech context?
What principles should guide us in transferring control or ownership?
We work with diverse kinds of farmers who struggle to stay in business, maintain their land, etc. and do not use technology.
We document their practices for, e.g., organic certification, and it is not staying with the farmer.
This sector of the farming population was missing from all the statistics.
As research exercise we created and co-designed a farm management systems (Lite Farm) as participatory action research project.
We have a community-generated product with value and need to maintain its free, non-profit status for the community.
Our question is now: How do we exit out of the university while maintaining the relationship of a public good.
We need a safe non-profit home that continues its relationship to global diversity and community.
We need to move at the pace of trust and maintain the relationships with the farmers.
Lisa (Market Link): How do you define meaningful inclusion? How can we make agtech more equitable?
USDA funded non-profit related to Snap, food assistance program and an online platform.
The system works for both farmers and customers.
One of the biggest access points is wifi - which in many rural places is not available.
We are working on making the systems for food assistance interoperable, e.g. the one for families with kids, one for elderlies, so they are not competing.
End goal is one place for all benefits in one platform. Bureaucracy is another hurdle, because it is hard on the retailer side to accept it, and same on the card provider side.
Also important that other tech companies don’t profit more than the customer.
Courtney (Tech Matters, Land PKS): How do you access what makes a tech appropriate? How
LandPKS is the sustainable land assessment system by Terraso. Soil ID is a mobile app designed to analyse soil. They have 5 principles:
- We include a diverse group of people throughout our processes. We created personas based on real people for that.
- We see equity by prioritising the needs of our less-resources users.
- We co-create and build what users need instead of what we think they need. We conduct usability studies to evaluate. We sit and listen to them talk.
- We respect people’s rights and agency. They can keep their site public or private. We chose easy language in the agreement.
- Appropriate technology is usable; ease of use is as important. You need a water bottle and a phone camera.
Kristen (Good Agriculture): How do you assess what makes a tech appropriate? What design principles to you prioritise?
I am a farmer. I have lived all these experiences. Our office provides backend services to farmers.
We don’t offer a new accounting software; we say “Here are the three transactions that you can categorise and here is the report you can submit.”
I want everyone to spend at least a month on a farm so you understand what it’s like to have your 3rd 16-hour day in a row.
You can spend hours talking with farmers, but that doesn’t replace the hands-on experience.
Any tool for farmers requires hands-on experience.
Design principles and user feedback - I pay farmers for feedback, because those insights are valuable to me.
We are testing a voice-to-database connection and I text them to remind them, so we need a user interface for this to enable that feature.
I go out to farms to watch them use it. All of these pieces have to be on the table to create something useful.
Serena (PASA): How does operating multiple data collection options enhance your project?
What barriers have you faced in balancing usability and inclusivity?
I work on community science soil benchmarking systems. Planting, soil disturbance, grazing.
We have a survey through surveystack, printed out forms, and we go to farmers in person or get data over the phone.
Only that way we include all the farmers in the community and keep them in our study, including Amish farmers and we often have new farmers without established record keeping practices.
There is a lot of effort involved in getting all this data. As we scale up this study, we need to find better ways, e.g. make sure to increase data validation so that the right data gets put in the 1st time.
Also on the backend to make it easier to review and consolidate data.
Jesus (Enticed): What are the biggest challenges in creating data-sharing?
We make it easier to reach underserved communities, primarily with farm workers the last four years. Our app was used to distributed 75 MUSDollars to over 8000 farmers for disaster relief.
We need to build digital trust - and how do we do that at scale with people that traditionally don’t use technology? 80% of them do now have cell phones.
- Who is on the other end? Build trust to the other end point.
- How do we verify data? so that it is useful.
- What are you doing with my data? We give them food boxes but at the end of the day they understood what they got and what we did with their data.
Example: Unmio identity data wallet (QR codes)
Jennifer (NRCD): How can technology assist with community engagement?
Why watersheds? (Aka catchment areas aka basins) Boundaries versus borders.
Conservation districts are essentially watershed governments.
1936 draft Standard State Soil Conservation Districts law, still in place today.
There are federal guidance documents on how to work with the community.
What we do for inclusion: We use Otter AI to transcribe.
That way, human note takers are not needing to take thorough notes, but more things that the computer cannot capture.
Both sets of notes are then processed by ChatGPT and need to be read thoroughly by human reviewers.
Environmental justice and civil rights compliance is mandatory according to case law so there needs to be a meaningful community engagement plan and an accessible language plan.
Show compliance with the law needs to be embedded so make sure to link it in your conservation action plan and apply it.
Videos of training linked in slides with QR slides.
————— end of first speakers round ———————
Hannah: We are trying hard not to reinvent the wheel - to know what else is out there and what is not served.
Part of the design principle of inclusion is to see what is out there and to keep building the trust with the community.
Elizabeth: We need to collaborate both to get grants and to serve the community well.
Jesus and Kristen chime in along the same lines - all pro collaboration.
Marie: Who approaches whom?
Elizabeth: Farmers tend to approach CAFF.
Ankita. Let’s zoom out. Each of you do meaningful community engagement. Can you talk about tool multi-functionality and what that stack might look like?
Elizabeth: We have three innovation challenge winners so ask them that challenge.
Q: Stories where farmer has come to you and asked for a specific component and where you were able to create something for them?
Hannah: Kevin can probably give specifics. We run monthly feedback sessions on Zoom and get feedback and they can discuss what they want.
We also get feedback through WhatsApp, an online dashboard, ways to submit feature requests through app, and 2-3 times a year we visit a partner in Latin America and talk to users, etc.
Yuri: What can be a call to action? I wish I had known about some of this technology that congregates information. How can we spread this knowledge?
Elizabeth: Collaboration with partners, keep an open door, hold trainings and workshops.
Kirsten: Keep showing up. Keep being there for the people that need the help and provide value. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Darren (UCSC agro ecology): Service to community - are there common denominators? What does this group and community need? (Yes, money, but what for?)
Kristen: Money is a factor, and acceptance of failure. We become paranoid about messing up because of limited money and time. Open lines of communication. People can give me feedback, and when I try again I am not viewed through that lens of failure. And I can try again because I don’t have to worry about whether there’ll be food.
Jesus: building decentralised architecture is hard, so being able to communicate these concepts.
Amber: Oftentimes marketing is not built into the budget.
Did you say “slides,” @julietnpn?
Hi Jamie, The original post is updated with slides!
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