Marrying of agri, ICT pushed

AGRICULTURE and information and communications technology (ICT) should be joined together to be able to address surfacing agricultural problems in Davao Region, said a digital innovation community executive.

“If we can marry ICT and agriculture, we can bring IT solutions for the agriculture sector, then that would be a perfect scenario for Mindanao. In Manila and Cebu, their technologies mostly support the tourism sector. Agritech is, I think, the tech start-up that we need here in Mindanao,” Techtalks PH Chief Program Officer Mary Rose Rontal said.

She shared two weeks ago, a Tech Start Up Weekend in Bukidnon was conducted. During the weekend-long event, participants were tasked to develop a tech solutions application within 72 hours. Their team won during the event with them developing an application helpful to the agribusiness sector.

“It was simply as taking picture of the plant, for example rice with a particular disease, and then the mobile app can already detect what kind of disease it was. It can also recommend a solution. Those are the kind of things that can help farmers. That’s an ICT-based solution to an agriculture problem,” Rontal said adding Mindanao need more of these developments.

Rontal also said agriculture remains to be the top business sector in Mindanao and would just need to be developed by modern and current technology.

During the event in Bukidnon, she said most of their competitors focused on app developments to address the issues on transportation sector. Rontal said they chose agriculture problems to give solution to since Mindanao is mostly dependent on this sector.