Existing Solutions

Sustainable agriculture, food security, water optimization

technical

The solution has different aspects, the institutional, the technological, and the organizational.

From the institutional point of view, RuralCat is promoted by the Department of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs of the Catalan Government; and the different institutions and entities around the Department are using RuralCat to be in direct contact with the rural sector.

From the technological point of view, the platform is made up of different open source software, Liferay as the Content Management System, Moodle for the elearning software, Zimbra for the eMail Management system and MySQL as the Database Management System.

From the organizational view, the operational team is made up of different roles in order to guarantee the wide spectrum of services given by RuralCat. Profiles like a project manager, journalists, web community manager, IT developers, IT architects, IT operational and maintenance technicians, agricultural experts, meteorological experts, usability experts and irrigation experts, are part of the operational team of RuralCat. Also experts and technicians from the Agriculture Department collaborate in an active way on the contents, the preparations of the different technical materials, the tutorial of the e-learning courses and the validation of the technical services.

The main aims of RuralCat is to encourage the use of new technologies in the rural world, help the sector grow by training and informing those connected with the rural environment and making them more competitive, drive the diffusion of knowledge and orientate users according to their common needs and interests. 

To this end, it offers:

• information services (news, technical reports, a calendar of events, market prices, and so on), agricultural plans and technical common issues are publish to the community;
• on-line technical training – e-learning (at the moment more than 2.500 students are enrolled);
• advanced applications (irrigation recommendations, agrometerological information, freeze alerts, meteorological forecasting, plagues models and alerts, crop status information services, …);
• and a series of services oriented towards its community and specific areas like irrigation, vegetal sanitation, …  (wikis, forums, social networks, and so on). 

It also includes specialized areas that offer cross services to address specific issues like irrigation, plagues, specific crops, etc. An example is the  Irrigation Virtual Office for the Catalan Farmers, that impulses and gives support to the farmers in the irrigation activity in order to make a more sustainable use of water.

Therefore, this platform helps the famers to be more competitive and make a more sustainable use of the environmental resources (water, soil, energy,….) It offers a set of technical information services that are complementary to the experience and knowledge they already have, and it will give them additional  information and tools, which are key elements in order to facilitate decision making process for the success of their own business and to preserve and protect ecosystems and optimize hydrological resources.

Currently, this solution is located at Catalonia, Spain.

It has been promoted by Agricultural Irrigation Communities, Agricultural Departments of Ministries, Agricultural producers, and Rural Development entities.

The project was promoted by Department of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs.  Key stakeholders were deeply involved throughout different stages of the kick-off: definition of e-learning model, identification of the key tools, determination of broadcasting information model, and so on.

At the following steps, an executive committee was set up in order to follow-up the continuous improvement and maintenance of the portal. Meetings are being held regularly and minutes posted into the website portal .

Furthermore, in order to ensure success at a local level, Department of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs has promoted local representation related to agriculture sector under the name of  Rural Schools for Agriculture. In this environment, RuralCat is used as an additional and strategic tool for teaching.

Thanks to RuralCat portal, the commitment of all stakeholders and  actors of agriculture, food-industry and rural world is achieved. As a result, a promotion and coordination development and management of water is underlined, which will contribute to their own optimal use and influence to food security goal.

RuralCat portal is already operational. Current project is based on  in the following topics:

• Information: Regular basis news related to agriculture, food-industry and rural environment are posted. Moreover, technical dossiersas well as new specific information sections are also available to all members of RuralCat community
• E-learning: New training are posted in this section, where users can enroll by themselves. Teachers post materials and perform e-learning classes are also on-line
•  Tools & Services: New tools related to irrigation improvement, plant protection, fertilization recommendation, agrometeorological data, new GIS service for localitation of users, schools, farms are some of the interesting utilities that RuralCat provides. In addition, in order to adapt to the current technologies, a mobile tool is planned to be implanted in a short-term
• Community: New communities are set up in order to gather people in a singular place so they can interact with each other. Tools like forum, library, agenda, wiki are available to each community

The key question RuralCat aims to answer is: “How can I improve the quality and efficacy of the activities of my farm, ensuring a sustainably productivity, guaranteeing a better agricultural water management, enhancing the production of more goods and services?”

RuralCat gives different solutions to accomplish it:

• Information services to  farmers to give information about meteorology and irrigation recommendations to do an efficient use of water
• There are a set of tools they can use in order to increase irrigation systems, agrometereological information, freeze alerts, forecasting, plagues models and alerts, crop status, and so on
• Latest news related to agriculture are posted so that farmers keep up to date with the hot news of their sector
• Collaboration with other farmers and with specialized technicians in different fields
• Agenda of hot events to attend
• Up to date market prices
• Possibility to attend to e-learning classes

In consequence,  RuralCat is a key element in order to be in touch with the agricultural community.

Since the target is the farmer and he/she uses RuralCat on a free way, the availability of a effective method to analyze the effectiveness of the solution and its impact into the rural world is required in order to monitor how much the tool is being used.

As a result,  the followint indicators have been defined:

• Number of e-learning courses attended: 100% of the courses are attended
• Time elapsed between a course is open until it’s full: Usually in just 2 days most courses are full.
• Number of visits (google analytics): over 30.000 monthly visits
• Number of pages visited (google analytics): over 158.000 per month

All these KPIs are in continuous growth and this is the reason why they are the evidence of the great added value that RuralCat represents.

As it has been stated in the previous part, interesting monitoring indicators  show RuralCat is an strong and useful support for innovation and new technologies applied to the agricultural, food-industry and rural sector:

• Number of e-learning courses attended: 100% of the courses are attended
• Time elapsed between a course is open until it’s full: Usually in just 2 days most courses are full.
• Number of visits (google analytics): over 30.000 monthly visits
• Number of pages visited(google analytics): over 158.000 per month

In addition, on-line polls addresses to the general users are carried out in order to find out and monitoring user satisfaction. Nowadays they have a good acceptance.

In the same way, specific polls are sent periodically to private users (enrolled) to get feedback about their experience. They have also get a good acceptance.

Moreover, some of the internal goals defined are listed as follows:

• Become leader on agriculture industry on the field of technical agriculture information dissemination
• Become a key reference in  e-learning on technical agriculture

With a close monitoring of the previous indicators and thanks to a continuous improving, RuralCat demonstrates is an useful essential support.

This solution now is addressed to the agriculture and rural world but this solution is also recommended to any other context that needs:

• Improve technical knowledge but due to geographical dispersion is not possible to attend to traditional training courses. E-learning with powerful tool like the one in RuralCat is the solution
• Set of tools to improve their business
• A meeting place where to share information and  collaborate with each other

 To upscale this solution to other context it would be needed:

• Good knowledge of the new sector in order to create attractive contents and useful tools
• Network of trainers for e-learning
• Communication plan in order to launch the tool on internet with success
• Key stakeholders to get field feed-back of the solution implantation

Project is being a success basically because of the great effort performed by all stakeholders: client, teachers, and journalists and of course development team. It is a multidisciplinary project that needs a cohesive team.

A key stakeholder is the client who should have important influence on the sector; in our case it is a very well reputated public institution.

Local feedback is very important and in this case, the client has already Rural Schools for Agriculture and  now with the virtual schools the knowledge has been spread out throughout the country.

In matter of infrastructure, RuralCat is based 100% on opensource software so that no licensing applies. RuralCat uses cloud technology so that there is no need for initial infrastructure investment either.

Our main satisfaction is to see how training courses grow every month along with the portal hits. 

ADASA is committed to replicate this successful solution  indifferent regions and countries and related to agriculture sector.

As a second stage, ADASA is also strong committed to extend the solution into others fields. 

www.ruralcat.net

ADASA

C/ José Agustín Goytisolo 30-32

08908 L’Hospitalet de Llobregat (Barcelona)

(SPAIN)

T. +34 93 264 06 02

adasa@adasasistemas.com

www.adasasistemas.com