Agro-met Services and Farmer Responsiveness to Advisories: Implications for Climate Smart Agriculture

Abstract

Agro-met services delivered through SMS by Watershed Organization Trust (WOTR) provides crop and locale-specific agro-advisories based on weather forecasts and the particular crop growth stage in order to reduce risks and improve agriculture productivity despite local climatic variations. The objective of the chapter is to understand the nature and importance of different components of WOTR advisory system and the response of farmers to the agro-met advisory services. An important aspect for developing a farmer-responsive agro-advisory system is the willingness of diverse stakeholders to collaborate (farmers, NGOs, Research institutions, Government institutions, private organizations) and converging of respective strengths. It was found that the content of advisories needs to be relevant to the location and to the specific crop to make an advisory system demand driven that is based on farmers’ needs.