 the rice crop manager partnering with national organizations in the field testing and improving rice crop manager and with support from the Department of Agriculture. Phil Rice is a partner with Erie in providing technical expertise and content, partnering with Erie in the field testing and also supported by the Department of Agriculture. These jobs here represent the five locations where there are pilot studies around the country. They represent the diversity of locations in terms of rice ecosystems from very favorable high yielding environments in Isabel and Nueva Sia to high potential areas in Mindoro to environments that are more challenging in Augusta del Norte and northern Samar which is also an area of emerging rice production. The dissemination of rice crop manager is being supported by the Department of Agriculture. This is an additional project where the support is coming from the regions. Director Ed Monsana is shown here in a workshop that took place here at Erie on the 17th of March. The aim is to reach more than a hundred thousand farmers this year with crop manager recommendations across the country and the DA has invested in the mobile devices and in the training to make this happen. Erie is being engaged to handle the training. So we're providing technical expertise, providing support in ICT, helping with the obtaining the correct gadgets and the correct efficient approaches to implementing the connectivity in the use of the rice crop manager. Erie is also providing monitoring to the DA. We will be providing regular reports to the DA in terms of performance of the regions down to the municipality level. So the DA will be able to monitor how their money is being spent. We are also developing training activities that are what we are targeted to more hands-on more effective ways of reaching farmers quickly. Here's an example of a training that took place just a couple of weeks ago in Carago which is Agusin, Del Norte. And the first day of this training is really an orientation to RCM, an orientation to ICT. Developing a core team that then goes out to the region within the region in training others and building other teams. The second and third days of this training is devoted to hands-on activities with farmers. No more lectures. Actually sitting down with farmers giving recommendations to farmers and learning the real world of what can happen when you don't have an internet connectivity or the Wi-Fi goes down. All the real world challenges that will certainly happen. And the intent then is to get recommendations immediately in the hands of farmers and go through a hands-on learning. In the process we're now able to provide the training of trainers, the teams, as well as the DA with feedback on the effectiveness in real time of that training. We can actually be monitoring the training here at headquarters or the DA can be monitoring it in their office to see such things as where do those farmers come from. So there were 51 farmers that were interviewed and given a recommendation in that training. Is that meeting expectations? Should they have done better or worse? Should they have been a better distribution from the region? What are the feedback that we can give for the DA can give in terms of improvements? We can do gender balances. Are they meeting the expectations in terms of gender and age distribution of those farmers? This is a type of information we can now provide in real time on training events as well as as the application goes out and is being used. Of course, the challenge is we don't yet know how that recommendation is actually being used by the farmer and that will be a whole additional set of activities that we must get in place very soon. Now to help with the accessibility of the crop manager, a website has been developed. It's now available and it's simply cropmanager.iri.org. Just go to cropmanager.iri.org and you will get a list of the applications that are released that are under development and under evaluation. You can see the main focal countries are Bangladesh, Indonesia, India, Philippines, Vietnam and there have been some activities with Africa Rice in West Africa. We're cutting across all three crops. Rice, wheat, particularly rice wheat systems and maize. And that rice wheat and maize work is in close collaboration with them. Now how does this evolve into an aggro advisory service? We see the rice crop manager as a starting point. It is an interview of the farmer before the start of the season is collecting preseason information and providing a preseason recommendation that is particularly geared towards a wise investment. One of the key ingredients is precision farming. Invest wisely at the start of the season based on what is known about the spatial variation of that field. Now it's not exactly what we would like to do in ICT is to provide a printout but the reality is farmers are needing to see something at the beginning that's visual. So we have to break a few of the rules here in terms of what we would like to do with ICT and give an actual printout at the beginning and invest in critters. But we see that as a transition to within season recommendations and one of the main activities that we will be engaged in this year across a number of countries and for those who are interested there are opportunities to join and that is to be examining different approaches in terms of text messaging perhaps needing to evolve into voice messaging to effectively provide a messaging service during the farming during the cropping season that builds upon the rice crop manager and also draws information that can come from knowledge banks, knowledge portals, etc. So this will be an interface into the rice crop manager and now you can see how an agro-advisory service starts forming is providing out information during the season but can easily be transitioned to provide post harvest information and marketing information weather information etc. This is where also a crop advisor that can build off the past experiences and successes of the rice doctor can be integrated into this. This would be a tool for interfacing with in the season to make diagnostic recommendations with to make diagnosis and then recommendations based on those diagnosis within the season. The benefits of an agro-advisory service would include farmers receiving advice initially as a printout but advice in other fashions through ICT throughout the season and beyond and the extension having more rapid access to information throughout and the faster we're able to bring in partners that also develop complementary apps the faster this will move. So large-scale dissemination and update with improved crop management with ICT as a facilitating tool. So what I indicated at the start was the hope and desire to set up a type of framework in which scientists can be benefited by their products of their research being incorporated into a conduit in such a way that they could see impact from their research and would not have to invest so much of their time. Now some of the ingredients that we're seeing is important in this are personal contact with farmers no surprise. So working with extension systems working with people on the ground will be important. Public sector extension system we believe is vital because there the sustainability of this will require investments from ministries and investments to the national system to maintain the crop advisory as well as to maintain the extension systems to take it out. So hence the endorsement of the national programs is important and ensuring that it's completely compatible with the recommendations of the national programs is vital. Training will be very important and I think Erie can have an important role to play in training. Computers and mobile devices will be essential together with the internet connectivity and that will be a work in progress. And again Erie can have a vital role to play in looking forward into this. Initially printed recommendations are probably going to be marketed. That's the way we see this evolving. Now opportunities for Erie scientists and for projects. First is the monitoring the deployment of technologies to farmers. So that collaboration is already started with CURE where our rain fed rise recommendations in indonesia and the philippines will be monitored. This goes back to the work that was originally started by Stefan. Some of you may have seen the video that was playing there at the start. That work that was funded through CURE that started with the rain fed recommendations being incorporated into nutrient manager and now crop manager is paying dividends. I will be at the CURE meeting next week and part of the discussions will be now about actually providing to the CURE donors reports on how effective this is to getting out recommendations in the countries where they have been working. Secondly the development of tools for management of improved germ plaza. So with ERIS the RCM the crop manager for stress color rises in the pipeline. So we'll be working with Sedancio and the team from Catholic Relief Services on this. Some of those team members will be here in about a month's time and we look forward to that activity and then link strongly with Distrosive. Incorporation of research products into location specific recommendations that would make products from scientists, activities of scientists that are relevant to fit into an advisory service opportunities exist at this point in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam. And that also applies for providing content and enhancement to an agro advisory service that can cut across the production cycle that can go beyond the production cycle and start looking even at the value of change. Contribute to training. One of the opportunities I believe that exists at Erie is that there are hundreds of visitors each year of farmers and extension workers from the Philippines. We have the opportunity to ensure every one of them leaves with an RCM recommendation. And the team working on the development of rice crop manager was involved two days ago in giving out recommendations to the farmers from the Green Super Rice Project. And I think those of you who took part in that you would see many surprises can come when you actually start doing this. I would encourage others to get involved with the team to do this because the amount of learning that will take place in terms of how to handle ICT and debug problems will be immense. And once that really gets onto the radar screen and gets into our our pool of assets then I think there are opportunities to build upon that with regional training within the Philippines where there's already a team from Erie that's been designated by a special order from the Department of Agriculture to be providing training. Members of Erie can be added onto that team I believe into the future. So with that now it's the time to thank some of the people that have made this possible. But I hope that before I do that I hope that what has taken place in this presentation is an awareness of the opportunity that is provided to scientists not only at Erie but with other organizations both international organizations and national organizations in terms of joining in a partnership into what could grow into really an agro advisory service that cuts across crops countries and information flows. Now this requires quite a large number of partnerships with national programs and with and countries. So here is just a limited list of people who have been involved. I make this list with a great deal of hesitation because I'm sure five minutes after this presentation I'm going to regret that I've missed someone. But in Bangladesh there is a Erie team headed by the head of the training center and 18 members on that team and Dr. Pallam who's an Erie employee that can very instrumental in this together with CISA work. So he split in time between CISA activities and activities on RCM. In India there's a CISA team, a team from Simmons, Andy Mcdonald, Dr. Malik, Dr. Varender, Dr. Kanda, Ms. Adisha, Shikil Sharma, and numerous field staff, some of them who have been here for training in the past. The Eris CRS team, Sudhanshal Ashok, and the CRS group based in Bihar and in Delhi. In Indonesia the team in Sukhumundi, Dr. Sarwin and the number of staff working with him. The Erie office with Zool and Dia. In the Philippines partnerships with Phil Rice, with Dr. Rangolado, Director of Research, Kuli Kalado, and Monsanto who has been very instrumental from the DA office and of course the DA RFOs. These regional offices are really making it happen. Now this is a future of rice production. I'm pleased to say that one of the challenges that I face as an older scientist is being sold. That one of the challenges I face is to develop a succession plan. So it looks like we have a succession plan here now for the research and long-term experiments. Looks like we're well on the way here to really targeting the way the research will take place. We really do thank Marco for his insights and his forward-thinking in ICT. This would in no way be possible without those insights and creative thinking of Marco. And this is an example of one of the coffee shop talks and discussions that has made this really awesome. We've had to learn that to be successful in this it's important to look three to four or five years into the future in terms of ICT and Marco has given us those insights and kept us focusing into the future. This is the crop manager team that's been working on crop manager and associated apps. I'm pleased that we have Adam Sparks and Joey in this because we see this as really a team that will grow and be in instrumentals and developing apps across the institute and beyond because one of the lessons we're learning is that to be successful with the rice crop manager we need complimentary apps as well that will help to show to the departments of agriculture the importance of ICT and how it can be used. So this has been a great team this is a team that has made it possible for me to present what I've given today. I'd also like to thank for the early support particularly on Del Ishmael is a scientist who is instrumental in the early support he's the one to put us in contact in early days with Mercy Corps and for Noel and David who have been very instrumental in setting the foundation from the beginning in this. So thank you all very very much and I this was an entertaining question. It's very much well on the team very impressive so we'd like to kick off with some questions or comments. Yes one after that please. Hello thank you for nice presentation I'm Mohammad Abdulmomin from Bangladesh Rice Recess Institute came here two years back two days back for joining a media school training. It's a wonderful opportunity for me to participate here and I have a suggestion for you Bangladesh the farmers are not familiar with English so the apps you develop they cannot use severely for language problem so do you have any plan to convert it in Bangla or I think in local language it will be the most familiar with farmer and they can use it easily. Thank you very much. Okay thank you for the reminder I forgot to mention that all of the apps are in the local language I failed to show that because of the audience today I was just showing it in English when I made the presentations in Bangladesh two days ago I was showing the screenshots in Bangla but yes it's in the local language I think one of the things that we're learning in this is that the translation is a work in progress we need to continue to work on testing and improving the translations to ensure that they are in a vocabulary and terminology that's understood by the farmers we've had a number of challenges with that in the Philippines where some of the dialects in the Philippines are different in different regions of the country so the translation we are finding is not as straightforward as initially thought and it does pose a number of challenges there's another additional challenge in Bangladesh and that is that the simple gsm phones do not all accept text messaging in the local script of the local language so we recognize that there are some challenges in the short term until phones in the future are all upgraded to to accept even text messages in Bangla. We initially started in Indonesia by working with a number of languages and gone back to just doing Bahasa Indonesia because it was really a lot of work to deal with all the subtleties of different dialects and how they vary within the country. I did not go through any of the technical details in the operation of the recommendations and we do this we regularly have programs in country where we spend hours or even a whole day going through this with scientists. We do have a question on the use of organic materials both the use of homegrown organics as well as commercial organics. The challenge we have the formula the algorithms are straightforward the challenge with organics is an issue partly of getting ensuring you have correct information from farmers. One of the challenges that we're finding with organics is that farmers often overestimate the amount that they apply because the association with the amount in an area is always not so straightforward for them so that's one challenge that we're having in the implementation. The other challenge is that scientists often overestimate the quality of the organics at the field level so we take published values that scientists give us and use that at the field level we often overestimate the value of organics. We also have to recognize that there are differences among scientists across countries. In Indonesia the use of organics is considered a soil amendment and normally they do not in Indonesia consider the nutrient content of the organic materials and making a recommendation whereas in other countries like India, Bangladesh, Philippines the nutrient content of that organic is expected to be considered in adjusting the inorganic fertilizer. So there are a number of issues that we have to tailor the calculation to in each country but certainly it is on the radar screen and something we do in every country to the best of our ability and it is a continual it's an area of continual improvement. Roland you didn't mention partnership with the private sector, I don't think Paul Fox was just telling me yesterday that ACI are about to send out 30,000 new voices to somebody who put people who bought fertilizers from them and maybe they're more likely to have more advanced IT devices than DAE extension offices. We are we're in a partnership in the Philippines with a fertilizer company and we expect in our target is May 1st but let's say June we will have in the Philippines a operating customized rice crop manager for a fertilizer company. This is being done with knowledge and discussions with the Department of Agriculture. So the applications that I showed here plus the one from the fertilizer industry will be in total harmony and they will be operating simultaneously giving farmers the opportunity to select. So that will be the first one off the off the line. We're also in partnership with fertilizer companies right now in Indonesia where a memorandum of understanding has been signed and we're working with one in Vietnam to develop sort of the modalities of how we actually implement public and private sector partnerships. Just while the website's coming to you so what does fertilizer companies need one specially tailored for them rather than just using the generic version? Different companies want different different tools some and it depends upon depends upon the company it depends upon the vision and the objectives of the company and that would be a seminar in itself but some companies would like to simply to use the existing app and to just have the training and capacity building of their staff. Others are organizations that are seeing fertilizer as integrated with other inputs that they provide and would like to look at the integration of inputs. Others are into specialty products and would like to accommodate specialty products. Can you explain what the difference between the output for the rice crop Andrew is then for what was for nutrient Andrew? So what are some of the new recommendations that are made? They are going through that slide here. Yeah this one right here so in this slide right here only the top part on nutrient management would have been in the nutrient manager. Everything below nutrient management is an add-on into the crop manager and the components that are added on depend upon country. They depend upon countries they depend upon the partnership and really how fast we move with the countries. A place to say that the partnership on this is moving very fast in Bangladesh. It's moving to the scale right now where we are being challenged with the BEERY to really start developing varietal specific recommendations. Within this year there will be varietal specific recommendations particularly in the area of crop protection that will probably be in this and they will be recommendations endorsed by BEERY. In Indonesia it's still in a development stage but it's also moving quite quickly. In the Philippines we're more at the stage really of disseminating right now where the big thing that we're working on in the Philippines right now is that we've discovered in the Philippines that one of the constraints is that the recommendation needs to really be tailored to the resources and exposure of farmers to extension. That is that really we need to do a better job of categorizing farmers in terms of whether they are the level of progressiveness for lack of a better word and that is farmers that have access to more technologies more access to markets need different tailoring of this than farmers that are removed from markets that may be further from the road that have less access to extension workers and we are focusing this year on how to implement that. Family resistance like with BEERY there are a lot of soil scientists there who've been working on fertilizer recommendations for their whole careers and all of a sudden that's all replaced with something quite different but I see you've got a committee of 20 people BEERY working with you so are there any issues there or is it straightforward? Let me just say this is not for the faint hearted there is certainly the year it's years of discussion and years of interactions with people and it's a series of compromises and based on science. Okay the chance for one last quick question well it's my great pleasure to present you with another plaque to go with all of the other prestigious ones on the wall thank you very much