Digital Green is a research project that seeks to disseminate targeted agricultural information to small and marginal farmers in India using digital video. The unique components of Digital Green are (1) a participatory process for content production, (2) a locally generated digital video database, (3) human-mediated instruction for dissemination and training, and (4) regimented sequencing to initiate a new community.Unlike some systems that expect information or communication technology alone to deliver useful knowledge to marginal farmers, Digital Green works with existing, people-based extension systems and aims to amplify their effectiveness. While video provides a point of focus, it is people and social dynamics that ultimately make Digital Green work. Local social networks are tapped to connect farmers with experts; the thrill of appearing "on TV" motivates farmers; and homophily is exploited to minimize the distance between teacher and learner.In a four-month trial involving 16 villages (1070 households), Digital Green was seen to increase adoption of certain agriculture practices by a factor of six to seven times over classical persononly agriculture extension. The hardware investment was a TV and a DVD-player per village, and one digital camera and PC shared among all 16 villages. These results are very preliminary, but promising.

In this paper, we present what we believe to be the first documented experiment to replace an existing PC-based system that had goals of "bridging the digital divide" for an agricultural district with a mobile-phone-based system in which a small, but relevant amount of data is transferred to farmers via SMS text messaging.Implemented in rural Maharashtra, Warana Unwired sought to replace an existing PC-based system for managing information in a sugarcane cooperative with an SMS-based mobile-phone system. In an eight-month trial involving seven villages, Warana Unwired successfully replicated all of the PC-based functionality, and was found to be less expensive, more convenient, and more popular with farmers than the previous PC-based system. This paper discusses the early investigations of the Warana Wired Village Project that led to the conception and implementation of the Warana Unwired project. The new system is described in detail, and results, both quantitative and qualitative are analyzed.

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