IBM this week awarded the 2020 Call for Code grand prize of $200,000 to the creators of an app that helps small farmers threatened by climate change decide what to plant and when. 

Call for Code was launched by IBM and David Clark Cause in 2018 to develop tech that tackles some of the world’s biggest challenges. Since then the movement has grown to over 400,000 developers and problem solvers across 179 nations and it is now partnered by the United Nations Human Rights Office and The Linux Foundation.

According to IBM:

The Call for Code initiative is the largest tech for good initiative of its kind. The world is facing unprecedented, interconnected challenges and we believe technology can help, whether that is through challenges, deployments or open source development.

The 2020 Call for Code Global Challenge winning solution is Agrolly, an app that uses IBM® Cloud Object Storage, IBM Watson® Studio, IBM Watson Assistant, and The Weather Company to fill in the information gap so that farmers with few resources available to them can still make educated decisions, obtain the necessary financing, and improve their economic outcome.

It was created by a group of students with diverse backgrounds and experience who are from Taiwan, Brazil, Mongolia, and India and who came together at Pace University, a private university with its main campus in New York City.

Agrolly provides a full service solution to execute climate risk assessments. Featured in the platform is a long-term rainfall forecast, which is tested periodically for increased accuracy, in addition to crop water requirements for the Food and Agriculture Organization for the United Nations (FAO), which is tailored for the location of each farmer, type of crop, and stage of the farm. Agrolly also provides a forum module allowing farmers to exchange information and solutions and allows text and picture uploads. Lastly, it includes crop-risk algorithms allowing for risk assessments to be executed by small farmers.

As well as a cash prize of $200,000, Team Agrolly will receive  help and resources from IBM experts to incubate, develop, and deploy its solution, and assistance from the Linux Foundation to open-source it so that developers across the world can improve and scale the technology. IBM’s goal is to ultimately deploy the winning solutions in the communities where they are needed most – like past Call for Code winners Project Owl in Puerto Rico and Prometeo in Spain.

Agrolly is currently available as a free Android app in the Google Play store. In the future, the team plans to monetize the product by offering a risk solution to banks that provides information they can use to choose which farms to fund and to create a paid service that connects farmers to experts who can help them with their specific needs. However, the central Agrolly app will always be free for farmers.

More Information

IBM Call for Code

Agrolly advances capabilities for small-scale farmers with technology innovation

Agrolly on Google Play

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