Awards success for Access Agriculture
Steve Allen

Congratulations to our client, Access Agriculture, who were award winners at this year's EVCOM Clarion Awards held at an international ceremony in London on Friday last week.

The team scooped Gold in the International Award for Innovation category for the Access Agriculture website, which provides an invaluable resource of agricultural training videos in local languages to enable farmers from around the world to share knowledge and skills. The site was particularly singled out for the way in which it provides its content in multiple different ways and formats, ensuring that the content is accessible to the whole of their target audience, regardless of factors such as remoteness of their location, computer equipment availability and internet connection strength.

The Clarion Awards champion community and environmental projects around the world. In addition to their Gold award, Access Agriculture also received a highly recommended award in the video category.

Adaptive have been proud to work with the Access Agriculture team since 2015, providing support and development on the organisation's main website as well as their sister website, AgTube.org - both developed in Drupal. During this year, we have developed a custom platform for managing and hosting the video and audio content on the site utilising Amazon Web Service's ETS tools (Elastic Transcoder Services). 

Through a series of bespoke Drupal modules, we integrated ETS functionality into the Drupal sites to provide a seamless method for uploading video content, transcoding it into different formats and qualities suitable for a variety of different devices and bandwidths, and then streaming the content back to the website via suitable players. The functionality also allows for multi language versions of the content to also be uploaded along with PDF transcriptions of the content. Downloadable Audio and 3GP (mobile phone) formats are also available. This wide range of different formats available via the service is a key part of enabling Access Agriculture to deliver the different formats to their target audience.

In acknowledgment of our work on the project, Access Agriculture founders Josephine Rodgers and Phil Malone kindly invited two of our team, Darren Holden and Kat Wesley, to join them at the awards ceremony on Friday afternoon. It was an honour to have been able to share in the team's special moment as they picked up their awards and we're delighted with the success of the websites. 

Pictured above are Darren and Kat from Adaptive (far left and right of the photo) along with founders Phil Malone, Josephine Rodgers and Access Agriculture's Executive Secretary, Bob Muchina.

Find out more about the Access Agriculture project by visiting www.accessagriculture.org.