Nicaragua Creates Innovative Agricultural Information System With Open Source

johanneswilm writes "Nicaragua is the second-poorest country of the Americas. It is now also the Latin American country with the most capable web-based information system for agriculture, thanks to open source software. ALBAstryde itself is open source, and it is based on Django and jQuery. It allows the user to play with the data, and its reach is further extended by a net of radio stations which are broadcasting the numbers to remote peasants, who thereby, for the first time ever, get up to date data on prices and general production levels in the country. The implementation for the ministry of agriculture of Nicaragua already contains live data."

Comments

North America Ag systems

[inKubus]

It would be an interesting exercise to check out the U.S. systems and review how they could be improved. Especially the market systems. The USDA does a lot of monitoring of various local markets for everything from cattle to hay to everything in between. Conditions at all these markets contribute to the commodities price at the main trading markets in Chicago. If you look at the USDA data though, it's all still old mainframe stuff with tab delimited all caps formatting. The data is all fairly disjointed and it's not possible right now to mine the data unless you want to collect and translate it all into your own data warehouse. These market reports often contain interesting information about why the price is being affected, such as weather conditions, etc. I think the government should do a better job of making this data available to the public. You know the big trading houses have negotiated direct feeds to this data, and I think that gives them unfair advantage in determining market pricing.

Re:North America Ag systems

[inKubus]

Everyone determines their own market price, and either you buy or you don't. You are right, big houses do make the largest contribution to the actual pricing, but everyone makes that decision on their own. The small players (consumers), although individually insignificant, together make a huge contribution to the market price. But that usually isn't based on information about the futures market but rather their current economic state. Apples have a price at the grocery store, and what they now cost is what they cost. You have to make the decision at the time you're in the store whether to buy or not. But (and especially for food) this is not a good free market. Consumers should be able to plan when they buy the apples so they will . If you have access to the market information for the next month's apples, and you see that you can get them for half what you could get them for now, you could defer your purchase (if you can) and get more for less. A true free market depends on ALL participants having full access to all the information in the market. Instead, it's largely decided by traders, which means we are subjected to these massive bubbles which are all making a few people a lot of money and its us who suffer. Now, there are fringe benefits to this. In general it smooths out pricing, because the public will constantly over pay which enables higher inventories and that acts as an insurance policy when prices rise (more supply is then dumped). That's fine, I don't care about the public, it's the domination of the market information by a few big guys when there are a lot of people who are interested in investing in this market.