XII Scientific Excellence Award 2023

As part of the XVIII Annual Technical Monitoring Workshop, known as the Knowledge Week, the XII FONTAGRO Scientific Excellence Award was granted to the project “AhoRa: Application for family farming of musaceae”. This initiative is led by AGROSAVIA (Colombia) and co-executed by IDIAF from the Dominican Republic, INIA (Peru), and the University of Piura (Peru). The project presented the development of a mobile application as a sustainable improvement alternative, based on local climatic information, for family production of Musaceae crops in Colombia, Peru, and the Dominican Republic.
The initiatives that concluded this year and competed for the award alongside the winning platform were:
• HUB, SmartFruit – ALC. Alejandra Ribera. (Universidad de la Frontera, Chile)
• Digitalization of small-scale agriculture. Luis Sandoval. (Zamorano, Honduras).
• Irrigation advice system and ICTs. Gabriel Angella. (INTA, Argentina).
• Scaling continuous improvement in family-owned organic banana exports. Domingo Rengifo. (INIAF, República Dominicana).
• Multi-agency cocoa platform for Latin America and the Caribbean “Cacoa 2030-2050″. Eduardo Chávez. (ESPOL, Ecuador).
• Innovation and intensification for the adaptation of extensive family livestock production to climate change. Sebastián Villagra. (INTA, Argentina)
• Early warning for the management of potato late blight. Ivette Acuña. (INIA, Chile)

 

XI Scientific Excellence Award 2022

As part of the XVII Annual Technical Monitoring Workshop, known as the Knowledge Week, the XI FONTAGRO Scientific Excellence Award was granted to the project “Sustainable intensification of dairy”. This initiative is led by INIA (Uruguay) and co-executed by the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE) – Costa Rica, and the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA).
The project presented the development to evaluate sustainable intensification strategies, including the creation of the ‘Dairy Systems Simulation Model’ (Organizador Lechero OLE!) and the ‘Dairy Monitor 2’ (ML2), adapted to dairy production systems throughout the region. The Simulation Model allowed, with few and easily obtainable input data, modeling the base systems of each country and reaching consensus on improvement proposals, assessing the physical, economic, social, and environmental impact.
The initiatives that concluded in 2022 and competed for the award alongside the winning platform were:
• Rice with lower emissions and reduced water consumption (Patricia Guzmán – FEDEARROZ, Colombia).
• Sustainable intensification of family farming in the Altiplano of Peru and Bolivia (Roberto Valdivia – CIRNMA, Perú).