e-Agriculture, Finalists 2012

The livelihood 360 initiative, inaugurated in January 2011 by the Naandi foundation, is based on an extensive focus towards building capacities of more than 25,000 farmers in LEISA (Low External Input Sustainable Agriculture) practices. The key vision is to create market linkages for the farmers to achieve higher incomes. Further the planting of six million trees in three years aims at improving food security, nutrition, income, shelter, energy resources and the overall environmental sustainability of the farmers. This application runs on a basic J2ME enabled mobile phone with an aim of end to end data management for a cooperative based in Araku Valley, consisting of farmers producing coffee and pepper. The objective of this initiative is to create a linkage from production to processing and further provide value addition in agriculture and marketing. This is the case since the application helps in capturing yield estimate, actual yield, processing details and also all financial transactions for the Cooperative with the support of basic mobile technology.