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.

Re:hmmm.

[Abreu]

Nicaragua's climate is not best suited for coca... Pot would probably be best

Should be vry interestng to see how this works out

[KarmaOverDogma]

If small time farmers can prosper using this system in one of the poorer country in Latin America, this could bode very well for fair-trade types of practices and businesses, as well as micro-lenders, all over the world.

Good luck, amigos!

Good Job

[royallthefourth]

So Nicaragua comes out and does something really interesting and in response we subject their 400 mhz K6-2 server to the Slashdot Effect. Whose idea was this? Henry Kissinger?

Re:Good Job

[jedidiah]

Geeks are a scary lot when they hate you.

They're even a scarier lot when they LOVE you.

So...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

How long before Microsoft announces "Microsoft Hinterland ShareCrop Server 2010" to compete?

Vaporware

[mi]

It is now also the Latin American country with the most capable web-based information system for agriculture [...] already contains live data.

Shut up and report back, when agricultural output in the country increases by, at least, 50%...

For benchmark, this source reports: During 1990-2000 the agricultural output grew by a yearly average of 5.7%. In 2001, the agricultural trade surplus was $85.2 million. But that was when the Sandinistas were out of power. They are ruling the country again since 2006, when Daniel Ortega returned to the presidency with 37.99% of the vote.

In 2007 they were afraid of a famine blaming a hurricane. Unless their policies are drastically different now, they aren't going to achieve much good, even if they use Linux for their command-and-control implementation of economy — for the Greater Good (TM).

Re:Vaporware

[hyades1]

Yeah, those hurricanes never do as much damage as those Third World socialist creeps try to claim (cough) Katrina (cough). If they weren't socialists, there wouldn't be a problem.

Re:Vaporware

[DavidShor]

With all due respect, I invite you to compare to stop cherry-picking and do an actual comparison of the living standards in states run by democrats vs by republicans. See admittedly partisan http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/politics/red-blue-states-summary.htm , http://blog.lib.umn.edu/cspg/smartpolitics/2009/09/red_states_have_higher_crime_r.php, and FuckTheSouth.com .

To sum up the data: Per Capita Income in "Blue" states is 20% higher then in Red States and Graduation rates are 5.4% higher. Violent and Property crime are 11.1% and 10.1% higher respectively in states controlled by Republican Legislatures. In terms of taxation, "Blue" States overwhelmingly pay far more in taxes then they receive in federal outlays, with the money going to "Red" states. Interestingly, under pretty much every measure of administrative efficiency, Democratic governments do better then Republican ones, by a sizeable margin.

Brush it off as the price of hedonist sin? 9 out of 10 of the states with the lowest divorce rates are blue states, while all 10 out of 10 of the top 10 states are red states. All of the top 16 states with the highest abortion rates voted for Bush, while 9 out of 10 of the states with the lowest rates voted for Kerry.

Unlike you, I'm not going to be a dick and assume Correlation-->Causation, but for what it's worth, the evidence is on my side, not yours.

Other nitpicks:

1) When my home state, Florida, got hit by Hurricanes in 2004, crop yields fell by 40%. But unlike Nicaragua, we were part of a large country, most of which was not hit by a Hurricane, that was able to carry us through for our eating needs. Nicaragua meanwhile, is roughly the size of Miami-Dade county. When it gets hit by a hurricane, the entire country gets hit. And so without importing food from elsewhere, famine is inevitable. It's a little inexplicable that this didn't occur to you in your analysis.

2) "There was no famine in New Orleans. There was a major break down in law and order and other failures of the local government."

Don't rewrite history. I remember when it took days and days for the government to get *anybody* to the Superdrome as 20,000 people were in dire need of food and water. We spend more on our military then literally every other country combined, but we couldn't air drop food and water onto a large stationary target on our territory? (And don't mention security. Our National Guard manages to run humanitarian efforts in Fallujah under heavy weapon fire). It was a terrible display of incompetence, and voters saw it too, with the disaster triggering a huge structural decrease in Bush's approval ratings.

3) Unless the pre-Katrina government of New Orleans engaged in policies that nationalized the means of production, then calling them "Socialist" makes you look like a dumbass.

Hopefully it works out

[future assassin]

and show that giving poor countries technology so that their people can learn, grow and prosper will work out better then just throwing food and money at them just too keep their miserable, go nowhere lives going.

Give a man a fish he eats for a day, teach a man to fish he eats for a lifetime.

On the other hand it would be in best interest of big corporation that these poor countries don't move up and prosper as this kills cheap labor.

Re:Hopefully it works out

[0100010001010011]

Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.

Re:Obligatory...

[hullabalucination]

we will kill you and install a brutal military dictator who will slaughter your people for generations to come.

Citations needed

Here you go:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/867178/posts