Are You Smart About Climate Smart Agriculture? American GrainPro Is, But Not Quite!

Once an Editor, always an Editor. Filipino, a UP Los Baños BS Agriculture major in Ag Edu 1965 graduate, I taught myself writing & editing science texts starting April 1975, copywriting 2 years before. Now comes this GrainPro challenge of a copy.

Editing science must be repetitious, and 100%-attention labor each time. No exceptions. The need to re-read & re-edit for quality is my experience in the last 47 years, from April 1975 when I was hired as a writer, and immediately became the Editor In Chief of the Forest Research Institute (FORI), based at the campus of the UP College of Agriculture (UPCA). FORI is now ERDB; UPCA is now UPLB – how time flies!

Today I have 81-year-old editorial eyes with a sense of close affinity to text declaring the world is suffering from man-worsened climate changes. And my heart goes to the small farmers. That is why GrainPro’s Facebook post titled “Hope For Smallholder Farmers In Adapting Climate-Smart Agriculture” caught my attention. Visiting the source page at GrainPro.com, this copywriter was disappointed with the technical article:

GrainPro failedto match its own promise of small farmers combatting climate change via climate-smart agriculture (CSA)!

“Hope For Smallholder Farmers In Adapting Climate-Smart Agriculture” promised much and delivered little, succeeding in promoting its smallholder technologies of grain drying while failing in promoting CSA from planting to harvesting – GrainPro saw a great opportunity, and then lost content!
(image of “Editor” from Foxit.com)

If I were the copywriter for GrainPro, I would have written in it a complete set of inputs and outputs, technologies & systems, up to and including marketing.

I have “known” GrainPro ever since Los Baños-based IRRI helped that company successfully improve its “Solar Bubble Dryer” and commercialized it 7 years ago, in Sept 2014 (Knowledgebank.irri.org). I believed so much in the GrainPro dryer’s ingenuity and usefulness for small farmers that I blogged about it on 06 Nov 2014 (see my essay, “Farmer-To-Market Research. A Challenge To Telangana & ICRISAT,” Icrisatwatch.blogspot.com).

But for GrainPro to sell its inventions and use CSA to promote them without adequately presenting what makes climate-smart agriculture smart is to me not smart! At the stage when you are already using GrainPro’s dryer, you are almost done with your farming before you started with CSA!

As it is, it seems to this Editor that all GrainPro really cares is to sell its inventions, not much else. But I blame the Copywriter or the Editor, not GrainPro.

GrainPro says:

As defined by the United Nations, climate change refers to the long-term shifts in temperature and weather patterns in a particular location. While these changes are natural, human activities, more specifically the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that we generate as a result of our actions, have been the main driver of climate change.

GrainPro, what have smallholder farmers been doing that drive climate change? You failed to mention those, so farmers cannot relate your dryer to CSA. Sorry GrainPro, your climate smart agriculture copy doesn’t look thatsmart. You can do better!@517

 

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