Neayi — Our proposal

In our previous articlewe describe our perception of the agricultural world.

Neayi

Neayi comes from “a New earth” in modern Greek (νέα γη). This earth, Gaia, nurturing, maternal, primal, of which one has forgotten the importance at the point of use beyond what it is capable of supporting...

Our logo represents the earth, supported by two hands, which we don't know if they give him comfort, or as an Atlas of the modern, the support for it is not collapsing.

These hands are transparent, because Neayi uses the intangible, the thought, the knowledge, the collective intelligence.

Finally, the logo is blue and green, the colors of life, of water and of the sky, the essential components of our ecology (from Greek οἶκος / oikos (" maison, habitat ") and λόγος / lógos (" discourse ") — the knowledge of our home, therefore, to better live in harmony with the land and the nature.

The triple performance

The triple bottom line is to aim for the environmental performance, economic and social. It is also a reflection of the whole of the agricultural sector for the past ten years, seeking a new direction for the successor to 50 years of agricultural policy essentially productivist regardless of the environmental or social impacts.

The triple bottom line, therefore, is a goal toward which we must strive :

• Reduce pollution (water, air, soil), and ensuring that all aspects of health
• Increase or at least maintain the level of living of the farmers
• Improve working conditions (working time, but also arduous and health of farmers)

There is no recipe, but a set of practices that, combined, can help to achieve this goal, in a given context particular which will be different from one operation to another.

Each of these practices will also be much more technical and require knowledge of agronomic, technological, mechanical (for example, more and more farmers modify, or even create their own tools to work with latelierpaysan.org)

Some of these practices are rooted in a technological future that gives the disease — for example Farmstar uses satellite maps to map the areas of missing nitrogen or organic matter. The results are imported directly into the console of the tractor, which then allows a variable application of precision. As a result, less work for the farmer, less expenses (cost of inputs), and less environmental impact (use of inputs only if necessary).

Other practices that seek to find a point of inflection between investment and performance. It is this that has made it one of the farmers that we interviewed, in his dairy operation : by ceasing to feed his cattle with forage crops (purchased) and soybean meal (potentially GMO, imported), to make “just” graze on the grass in his fields. This “simply” took three years of implementation : conversion of its plots in the grass (instead of corn, and cereals), transition in mono-milking-cows-eating less, they also provide less milk), choosing a breed of cow that is compatible, moving cows in other fields, and stopping the trafficking in winter, etc... Finally, significant drop in income (less dairy production), but also significant reduction in expenses (no more need of the equipment used before on the plots for wheat and maize, or inputs, or fuel, or fodder), for the total increase of the profitability of the operation. In addition, thanks to the mono-trafficking, the judgment of the cultures, of the treaty in the winter, the farmer reached a significant time. Finally, it has reduced its dependence on external purchases. All production is now in organic agriculture which is easier to manage when you no longer produces cereals, with the satisfaction of being in a system that is consistent with the natural biology of animals.

A platform ?

Neayi offers platform to help farmers to trade on these techniques. In practice, it is a forum, on which you will be able to ask questions and to have the answer.

Many farmers are already using Facebook, for example, to ask questions or forums such as the Earth-Net. These forums are organized such a way that a relevant question can be quickly drowned in a stream of comments and information. In the group of Facebook on conservation agriculture, nearly 42,000 people interact with one another, often with contributions very sharp, with photos, links, etc, However this information is not structured, and it is impossible to reuse that knowledge.

Our platform allows you to optimize the way in which questions are answered, both on the way to notify the right people (based on their historical performance, their cultures), but also with ergonomics which tends to increase the relevance of the answers. For this, we use techniques of collaborative filtering, which are those that allow us to see some of the products on Amazon, in connection with his / her profile. We also use ergonomies “oriented”, such as those found on AirBnb, who is organising the seizure of comments tenants to the structure of a constructive way and thus encouraging confidence.

Why farmers would they need a platform fingerprint to get answers to their questions ? How were they doing before ? The reality is that they constitute a population that cultivates cooperation much more than we think. After all, the cooperatives are born and developed in the agricultural world. Many responses were made directly in the field — be it in the family (the farms are times of the father to the son), through tours of the plain, or in meetings organized by the chambers of agriculture, etc...

Many of the techniques are new and unknown to the network neighbourhood, offering little support from the local community.

The context, however, has changed. Half of the new facilities are now the people who do not come to the world of agriculture, and often of the projects proposed by women. Many of the techniques are new and unknown to the network neighbourhood, offering little support from the local community. The practices are also, we repeat, more and more technical and complex — leading to some critical questions. Each variable can have an impact on the emergence of weeds, the coming of the pests, the development of diseases, resistance to a climatic context.

Here, then, in a few words what we are working on, the next step is to put online quickly a first version, in order to start testing with a small group of users to the different concepts of the website : tripleperformance.fr (soon online)

Our project interests you ? Please do not hesitate to join us on our page Facebook or LinkedIn !