1st Annual Monsanto Scholarship for BDPA Students is awarded in August 2013 to three students ... each of whom will receive a $2,500 scholarships to assist with their studies. Della Anjeh is an incoming freshman at Pomona College. She is a member of our BDPA St. Louis chapter and participated in 2011 and 2012 on the chapter's High School Computer Competition (HSCC) team. She trained for six weeks in the summer of 2011 at Monsanto world headquarters office in preparation for the 2011 National BDPA HSCC Championship. Her scholarship application included an essay entitled, 'Communication, Knowledge and Innovation: Outcomes of Technological Advancement in Agriculture'. Della is a remarkable young woman and truly deserves to be known as a 'future face of technology'. Follow Della on Twitter: @DellzBells.

1. Communication, Knowledge, and Innovation: Outcomes of Technological
Advancement in Agriculture
By Della Anjeh
Technology has become an invaluable part of the modern world. Utilized in almost every
field of work in the work, it is only natural that it be applied to fields, where farmers harvest and
grow crop. Integrating technology with farming and harvesting allows for a much larger and
better quality yield to be attained, which is the only acceptable outcome for a population growing
exponentially. Monsanto and countless others have been taking many steps to improving
technology for agriculture. For example, the Irish Potato Famine in the mid-nineteenth century
was caused by a type of water mold called “potato blight.” It doesn’t come as much of a
surprised that with Monsanto’s innovative technological integration with harvesting crops, these
serious plant diseases can be prevented and become things of the past. CocoaLink and V-Care
illustrate how technology has allowed people to gain a heightened ability to communicate, more
knowledge, and the power of innovation.
The Ivory Coast is the largest producer of cocoa in the world. The importance of cocoa
led the Conseil Café-Cacao (CCC) to create a mobile phone application called CocoaLink. This
app serves as a way for cocoa farmers to give and receive information about farming cocoa.
Already about 70 percent of farmers use mobile devices, and this app connects them all wherever
their farms are located. In addition, the app can connect the farmers to experts in the agricultural
field who give advice on disease prevention, pest control, and the most efficient way to use
fertilizer. One app has allowed a multitude of farmers, spread out throughout the Ivory Coast, to
share information with each other as if they were all working on the same field. This is the power
of technology. It allows these farmers to communicate, to gain new knowledge about their trade,

2. and allow them to use these new ideas to think on their feet and possibly developed new methods
of farming on their own.
Monsanto’s V-Care in Vidarbha, India has brought success and hope to the cotton
farmers located there. With Monsanto working with agricultural experts in the region, these
farmers were able to gain the tools necessary to plant a bountiful harvest of cotton and in turn
generate more money for the region, resulting in an improved standard of living. These farmers
gained information on farming cotton in a fast and reliable way and used them, which rewarded
them with a cotton yield 42 percent larger than the year before (2011).
Black Data Processing Association and Monsanto are invaluable to this venture into
revolutionizing how technology can be used in agriculture because BDPA provides the people
and Monsanto has all that technology built or ready to be built by the students that BDPA has
taught. BDPA teaches the fundamentals to working easily and successfully with technology to
people who might not have had the opportunity to learn these complicated concepts in their
community. BDPA and Monsanto are growing to include and inspire young minds to pursue
bigger and better things using technology.