The DA Rice Industry Program, in collaboration with the International Rice Research Institute, conducted a study to design and develop an integrated and digital platform software that serves as a comprehensive searchable database of digital agriculture tools and services (DATS) for rice industry.
Funded by the DA-Bureau of Agricultural Research, the project titled, Assessment of Digital Tools for Data-Driven Decision-Making on Rice-Based Agri-Food Systems in the Philippines (D4AgPH), initially provided an assessment of the current state of the digital agricultural landscape and identified gaps and opportunities to support the development of a digital platform.
As of December 2023, D4AgPH site has collected and evaluated a total of 204 DATS, 67 of which are active. This online platform serves as a tool towards a transparent digital agriculture ecosystem. It features an intuitive, user-friendly, and responsive interface. It has analytics to provide visual insights on the extent of digitalization of the agri-food value chain. These are the values or number of solutions distributed across the agri-food chain in the rice-based sector, production (15), input (11), retailing (4), wholesaling (3), consumption (2), consolidation (2), and processing (2). It is important to note that there are 21 tools in total for the rice-based sector, of which 10 tools provide 1 solution to only 1 sector in the agri-food value chain, while 11 tools provide solutions to more than 1 sector in the agri-food value chain. Further, focus group discussions and key information surveys were conducted with a) innovators to validate information about the DATS, and assess maturity and scaling readiness, b) agriculture extension workers and farmers to assess awareness and dissemination, and adaption.
The site also contains analytics for rice data in the form of graphs, information that is indeed useful for the target users like the key decision makers, agricultural offices, technology savvy farmers, and innovators.
Building upon the initial success of the project and to promote the digital platform for rice industry that is accessible to the public, efforts are being undertaken in terms of promotional events, further testing the platform, as well as encoding more DATS into the system. Promotional events undertaken include CashlessExpo-NRAM on November 19 and 35th Ugnay Palay Research for Development Conference on 29 November to 1 December 2023.