ICFA Working Group on ICT
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have played an important role in facilitating access to timely and accurate information for an improved agricultural production. Among the many IT tools that have found place in agriculture world wide mobile phones have been the most powerful. At present, 6.8 billion mobile connections have been established for a 7 billion world population. By using mobile phone technology, there have been diverse types of innovations taking place in the agriculture sector, which include commodity and stock market price information and analysis, meteorological data collection, advisory services to farmers for agricultural extension, early warning systems for disaster prevention and control, financial services, traceability of agricultural products, agricultural statistical data gathering, etc.
Considered as the next generation of extension services and IT based business apps, IT can play a transformative role in agriculture. The stream of agri startups, offering disruptive technologies and business models is providing the missing links in food and agriculture value chain. India itself has experienced many IT based startups that have bolstered the agriculture system of the country. The next phase of IT application in agriculture promising to transform the way we have been doing agriculture so far. Digital Farming is gaining momentum globally and it is set to make agriculture fully automated. International Conference on IT in Agriculture organized by ICFA thus becomes a significant step towards bringing together all the stakeholders on a single platform to discuss and evolve steps for expanding IT applications in agriculture towards digital farming and agri automation.
The Conference aims at achieving the following specific objectives:
