CLSU Summit On Agriculture – Why Not Add Intelligent Discussions On Creation Of An Intelligence Bank!?

Here’s adding to my earlier article “CLSU Sustainability Summit On Agriculture – A Much-Welcome Event, Also A First, If I Know My History!” (08 June 2024, Communication For Development Of Vibrant Villages, blogspot.com), I have a proposal to make it more exciting – a farmer-friendly digital knowledge bank!

(“Knowledge Sharing” image from bancadecunostinte.ro)

Here’s encouraging the Philippine Association of Career Scientists (PACS), via its former president Norvie Manigbas, who knows personally what I can singlehandedly do in the name of R&D in the matter of publications – he was a Board Member of the Crop Science Society of the Philippines (CSSP), publisher of the Philippine Journal of Crop Science (PJCS) when I, as the all-digital PJCS Editor In Chief, singlehandedly brought up-to-date the journal from being late 3 years (2000-2002) to up-to-date in the next 3 years (2003-2005), with improved quality to be included in the international prestige list called “ISI” in 2007. Tada!

I hope the PACS people can convince the attendees of the CLSU Summit on Agriculture to package a proposal to create a digital knowledge bank on both (1) Chemical Agriculture (CA) and (2) Regenerative Agriculture (RA) for almost-instant reference anywhere in the world. I’ll call it here “Agriculture Knowledge Bank” (ABK) that anyone with a computer can access anywhere in the world anytime. I am willing to help the PACS package the proposal to be presented at the Summit. 

The ABK is patterned after the original “Open Academy for Philippine Agriculture” (OpAPA) originated and submitted by then-ICRISAT Director-General William Dar (yes, our former Secretary of Agriculture). When Mr Dar submitted OpAPA to Philippine Agriculture via the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice), I as a PhilRice consultant, wrote a digital book that I titled “The Geography Of Knowledge” (TGoK) that explained what can be done and how it could be done.

I still have a copy of my book TGoK – digital knowledge remains to be a problem of immediate grasp even if your computer is connected to the Internet.

So! This is an advanced challenge to the organizers of the CLSU Summit on Agriculture.

The digital ABK should be accessible even to those who do not know any technical term in the science of agriculture – that is the secret of learning for beginning or non-farmers with my ABK!

For instance, you want to know about modern plowing, but you know only the word “araro” – so you type “ABK araro” (with or without the double quotes) onscreen and then press Enter.

ABK will then respond with something like this:

Plow araro (Tagalog)

Then ABK will show you links to the page(s) about plows. Click any or all links and see what you can learn.

Oh, and by the way, if all you know is Tagalog terms, ABK will always translate each term into English, so that you can further explore tha knowledge bank.

The beauty of it all is that you don’t have to know agriculture to learn from ABK. Because ABK speaks non-technically as well – and then leads you to more knowledge.@517