Real, Jose Camacho Is New Chancellor Of UP Los Baños – Virtual, How About Chancellor Of Farmers’ Agriculture & Horticulture Knowledge Bank?

 

Today, Thursday, 24 September 2020, the UP Board of Regents, BoR, elected Jose V Camacho Jr as the new Chancellor of UP Los Baños. I was hoping to present a national program proposal for the new Chancellor to consider, somebody else, but a Chancellor is a Chancellor. The proposal I call

Farmer’s Choice
a digital knowledge base that shows
even the options users did not know existed
in terms of technologies & systems they can use.

Today, there is no such knowledge system anywhere in the world – but it has existed in my mind in the last 17 years.

It started when Director General William Dar of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, ICRISAT, based in India, submitted to PhilRice a common knowledge project called “Open Academy for Philippine Agriculture,” OpAPA. All digital. As a PhilRice consultant at that time, I wrote up a whole book on how to implement OpAPA: The Geography Of Knowledge, all of 198 pages. Unfortunately, nobody appreciated it. Today, OpAPA as knowledge bank exists mostly in memory. (I still have a pdf copy of it; it’s yours via email: frankahilario@gmail.com.)

“Farmer’s Choice” is actually The Geography implemented in digital language. Given the pandemic and the public  & private PH restrictions extending to September 2021, I can see the timely opportunity to build that knowledge base while everybody else is worrying about everything else.

Digital is my world now. Like photography, I am self-taught in this skill. I am a graduate of BS Agriculture major in Ag Education, UP Los Baños '65. My personal joke is that I must be a good teacher because today I have no doubt that I am the world’s #1 blogger – having published in my many blogs at least 5,000 long essays on many subjects, but mostly journalism trying to sell progressive agriculture and creative thinking.

So, I understand the science of it all. I taught myself how to blog, so, in thinking about and wanting the best way for UP Los Baños to serve the Filipino people:

Considering the pandemonium,
digital is the best way to go.
Offering Farmer’s Choice.

This calls for UP Los Baños to digitize all results of its researches since it was founded in 1908 and collect them into a library. Technical Agriculture. Available to anyone, with the caveat that the language is meant for those who understand the science behind along with the jargon.

Then translate everything in that technical library into popular language that even a high school student can understand. Popular Agriculture. Available via the cellphone anywhere. Truly this will be science serving the people.

Mr Camacho cannot tell us that UP Los Baños has zero budget for such a nationwide digital project. It has been announced that past ICRISAT Director General and present PH Secretary of Agriculture William Dar “commits publicly P100 Million for UPLB R&D[1]”. With Farmer’s Choice, OpAPA will become both virtual and real.

I’m thinking: Science with a cellphone face!@517

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[1]https://www.da.gov.ph/dar-commits-p100m-for-uplb-rd/?fbclid=IwAR2ZGqlUeaFyOJhXgqP7aCVWrfS9p5-dozd31izkHQFLncmcy12qvbd2t6I