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Right: Partial screen capture of FarmKnow website

Farmers in Beijing's suburban areas have an Internet tool to help them with vegetable production practices. An innovative website called "Farmknow" is providing content and advisory services on new vegetable varieties and crop management and protection.

Farmers, agricultural experts and systems engineers participated in contributing towards developing the pilot database system. The pilot project involved interviewing 60 farmers from four villages at Ba-Jia, Qian-Liu-Ma, and Hu-Ge-Zhuang, outside Beijing for their experiential knowledge . The result is the design and implementation of the "BJ-FarmKnow" database system running on a MS Windows NT4.0 server and which can generate valuable information when queried through a Web browser. It has become the farmers' "scientific and technological assistant and friend" in their pursuit of practical solutions to vegetable production.

After undergoing two years of development and testing, the Farmknow website now offers a unique set of information resources. Farmers can search the 'Vegetable Hospital', for advice on treatment practices for over 70 different agricultural diseases and 30 kinds of insect pests common to the Beijing area. There is also a 'Market Information' section documenting prices for 140 seed varieties. Farming specialists are also on hand to answer e-mail queries directly from farmers.

Researchers at the China Agricultural University (CAU) recognized that in order for China to tackle the growing problem of producing enough food to feed its expanding population, farmers would need timely information regarding disease, pest control and market data. Farmknow was created in 1998 with the aim of addressing the information deficit faced by local farmers.

The BJ FarmKnow project received support from the Pan Asia R&D Grants programme in 1998. The Municipality Government of Beijing (through its Distance Learning Program) and the China Agricultural University (through its "211 Priority Disciplinary Development Program) co-funded the project with IDRC. The implementing agencies were the Institute of Plant and Environment Protection, Beijing Academy of Agricultural Science and the Laboratory of IPM Information and Software Technology (IPMIST) at CAU.

The Farmknow website is currently available in Chinese. Visitors to the website who cannot read Chinese can have the website translated using a web-based translation software such as Bablefish at http://babel.altavista.com

For further information on the Farmknow initiative, contact Dr. ZuoRui Shen Project Director at CAU.

2001-03-02

News 40 of 50