COVID-19 has greatly affected agriculture in Southeast Asian rural communities, impacting people in poverty, hunger, and decreased life quality. The digital revolution can support farming communities, gaining more income and distribution opportunities while tackling common problems.
Digital innovation may help farmers in several ways. Still, the goal is the same: making sure farmers have opportunities to get information, improve efficiency, give knowledge, and allow voices to be heard. Here are strategies to support farmers during the COVID era using digital technology:
Technologies like the internet, mobile gadgets, and far-reaching internet networks allow farmers to access real-time information. It gives farmers more benefits in accessing knowledge and important news.
Digital tools such as Nimbly allow researchers to create digital checklists, which they use to send questionnaires to farmers about their progress and challenges in the farm. With reporting capabilities available online and offline, they can fill it to give information about their problems and needs. You can list the responses, track the problems based on specific templates, and find solutions quicker.
Many farmers in the remote area have difficulties accessing distributors, markets, and customers. Digital technology allows farmers to connect with them, making it easier to sell their harvests and related products.
Data management, aggregate, and analytics can help farmers discover key trends that are surfacing in their crops and how best to mitigate the situation. The data obtained lets them receive information about land potentials and threats and take action swiftly. All of these are useful to create the best farming and distributing strategies.
Farmers in remote areas often have difficulties presenting their voices about problems, needs, and issues faced in their fields. Digital technology can help them create reports, data comparisons, and other important materials to support their cases. Farmers can also get connected with institutions, officials, and other important figures that can affect policies.
Digital checklist and data management tool like Nimbly is a great solution for supporting farmers. A case study has proven this software's efficiency when used in agriculture.
Wilmar International, a Singapore-based agricultural industry company, has worked with Nimbly to create a streamlined approach with their third party suppliers within their sustainable palm oil supply chain. In this case, the company uses Nimbly to gather information and detect issues within their plantations which is then used to create a proper assessment and strategy to resolve the problems .
Wilmar International made use of Nimbly features to create measurement and planning strategies. They were:
As the first step, the company needed to launch questionnaires and surveys to detect problems and needs. They used a digital checklist feature from Nimbly, which listed all the important, standardized questions. The checklist also allowed respondents to deliver opinions and complaints, creating a healthy research environment.
After making the questionnaires, Nimbly and the company sent them easily to the respondents' mobile apps. The company could also conduct interview and note-taking on just one mobile device, making the whole process more convenient.
Automated report generation eliminates manual work to input the information and data into report format. The result was automatically put into a spreadsheet format, which could be sent to many people at once. It also minimized the risks of mistakes when doing manual data input.
Nimbly provided a set of programs to create an issue tracker, which quickly alerted users about problems relevant to the program. In this case, the company could increase efficiency in spotting the issues and even getting quick recommendations with every problem flagged. It saves a lot of time in identifying important issues.
Working in agriculture fields means getting ready for remote locations, poor signals, and other issues related to connections. Nimbly has solved this problem by providing online and offline systems. Users could finish the assessment, report, and other tasks, even in areas without a strong internet connection.
The digital revolution can improve people in all fields, including agribusinesses in rural locations. With COVID altering many lives in Southeast Asia, the digital revolution shows that technology can support farmers through useful tools such as identifying problems and needs, create real-time reports and assessments, connect to markets and distributors, and amplify their voices. With Nimbly's technology, farming and agriculture can stay on track with the ever changing world.
Nimbly transforms manual operational audit processes into app-based checklists for front-line workers to generate reports instantly, centralize insights in real-time, and ensure thorough issue resolution.
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