The Digital Tools, Geospatial, and Farming System Consortium (DGFSC) held the second in-person workshop at Kansas State University, on September 29th and 30th.
The meeting was led by the Principal Investigator (PI) Ignacio Ciampitti, together with the participation of the co-PIs Jason Neff (University of Colorado, Boulder), Molly Brown (University of Maryland), Amirpouyan Nejadhashemi (Michigan State University), and James Gerber (University of Minnesota). In addition, team members from all universities participating in the consortium were post-doctoral students Michael Eggen, Ana Carcedo, and Nilson Vieira Junior, graduate students Luciana Nieto and Ruthie Burrows, and scholars Carlos Hernandez and Gustavo Nocera Santiago, together with our communication specialist Constanza Mackrey.
The purpose of the workshop was to discuss the future steps of the current projects and new strategies to development and deploy of new tools of the DGFSC consortium.
The DGFSC has been working on the main objectives for the last two years (further details can be found at https://www.siildigitalagconsortium.com/). Currently, much of the focus of the consortium is on the development and later deployment of digital tools. Together with the previously established goals, the workshop helped to redefine strategies for establishing and testing new innovations with the long-term goal of improving the resilience of smallholder livelihoods for enhancing productivity, economics, environment and social aspects of human wellbeing, including all aspects of the sustainable intensification assessment framework (SIAF, further details at SI Toolkit, https://sitoolkit.com).
"This workshop was a great opportunity to connect with all team members and discuss how we can improve the development and facilitate the deployment of digital tools to help policy makers and stakeholders from Senegal, Cambodia and Bangladesh”, Dr. Ciampitti stated.
The Digital Ag consortium is planning to have a third in-person workshop during 2023 (middle of March) with the goal of evaluating progress and success of achieving milestones.