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Open Source Simple Computer for Agriculture in Rural
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Workshop
- October 28-30, 2004 |
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The second workshop of OSCAR was held at the Directorate of Wheat Research, Karnal, Haryana from the 28th October to 30th October 2004 followed by field trips to rice fields and extension offices around Karnal and Kurukshetra. The workshop was inaugurated by Dr. Jag Soran, Project Director, DWR and was attended by all the staff members of the project. A presentation of the activities of Rice and Wheat consortium was given by Dr. Samar Singh which covered initiatives of RWC in areas of zero tillage and communication efforts like mobile seminars. A detailed review of the progress of work under the project was carried out and was categorised into three broad categories viz. botanical, technical and social aspects. Dr. Samar Singh, RWC and Dr. Juliana Prosperi, CIRAD presented the progress of work in botanical aspects with a background note on issues in rice-wheat farming practices in the Indo-Gangetic plains which identified declining ground water level and soil fertility, weed and pest management techniques as the core problems. Phalaris Minor, a weed of wheat is posing a major problem and though this can be controlled with direct-seeding rice, other weed species sprawl up replacing Phalaris Minor. It was also noted that there is also less crop rotation which only aggravated the problem. The list of most common weed species found in the Indo-Gangetic plains was debated upon and it was agreed to arrive at a consensus at the end of the subsequent field trips in Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. On the technical aspects, the issue of the level of abstraction to be used in drawings was raised following the feedback from farmers and students who were interviewed during the field trip in Nepal. It was also agreed to use the more familiar double click in the selection of characters and character states. A discussion on the fault tolerant capabilities of the application cropped up and the possibility of including a warning system based on a cross-linked table to warn the user when an inappropriate selection is made was discussed. This shall make easier the process of navigating and arriving at the right species for the end user. Dr. Rico Lie and D. Balasubramanian initiated a discussion on the social aspects, based on the experience gained from the field trip in Nepal. The issue of less number of character states available in the beta version was discussed. But given the fact that it is only a beta version and was mainly to be used to test the drawings and the architectural design of the application, everyone agreed to retain the present architecture and follow the same for the linux desktop version too. Also it was agreed by the team that the weed management and control part should be incorporated in the application since the need for control measures was more realised by the section of target groups, farmers. At the end of the workshop it was finalised to focus on the following three activities, before the next workshop at Wageningen University, The Netherlands: 1. Porting of the beta version of
OSCAR to Open source – IFP & CIRAD |
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