How ICT tools are improving efficiency of agricultural development

A Kenyan farmer sends a text message to enquire about the latest maize prices from her maize field in Thigio, near Nairobi. Photograph: Antony Njuguna/Reuters

Data collection and monitoring and evaluation (M&E) are a vital part of development work, as the results determine where public services are most needed, and what approaches prove effective.

The Futures of Farming

What the closing of Kansas City’s Mercantile Exchange can teach us about how Wall Street stopped treating food like food.

 by Elizabeth Rush
Just off of Country Road 518 in Hopewell, New Jersey, sits Double Brook Farm. It’s run by a self-exiled New Yorker but it’s not one of those now-standard upstart farms, with roving bands of earnest college kids tending rocket and a hearty couple of ex-Brooklynites overseeing the whole grass-fed operation. Double Brook’s turn-of-the-century-barn, its grazing cattle, and its hundreds of Rhode Island Reds clucking and strutting about all belong to Jon McConaughy, a 46-year-old with an all-American face, a football player’s build, money to blow, and a beautiful wife. Last year, McConaughy exchanged a two-decade long career as a commodities trader on Wall Street for these two hundred acres.