App seamlessly works in offline and online mode
Developing late-blight resistant potatoes has long been a priority for breeders, and hundreds of resistant varieties have been released in the past century. However, because of the pathogen’s ability to evolve ways to overcome the resistance of widely cultivated varieties, farmers still need to apply fungicides, and it is hard for them to know when and how much to apply. Willmer Perez, plant pathologist at International Potato Center (CIP), Lima, Peru, and his team have developed an easy-to-use decision support tool to help farmers optimize their fungicide use, in order to ensure good harvests while reducing production costs and health and environmental risks.
Perez and colleagues have designed a decision support tool that consists of sets of cardboard discs in concentric circles, which farmers align based on the variety they are growing, recent weather conditions and the last time they applied fungicides to determine when they should apply that agrochemical again. After testing this low-tech tool with farmers in Ecuador and Peru, to validate its effectiveness, the team designed a mobile phone app based on it. The original phone app can be used in areas without cellphone coverage, but a new version accesses weather forecast data on the internet to inform its recommendations. Nevetheless, both versions can work offline, so farmers can use them regardless of whether they have cellphone access.
