Hürriyet Newspaper Writer Elif Ergü wrote about the achievements of Tabit Smart Agricultural Technologies Co-Founder Tülin Akın in her Inspiring Women column.

TABIT founder and entrepreneur Tülin Akın, who established Turkey's first 'smart village': "If farmers say, 'There is an epidemic' and do not sow and spray their fields now, they will lose their crops. Our problem will be even bigger. We must take precautions and continue agriculture."

Tülin Akın is one of the entrepreneurial and courageous women who devoted herself to raising awareness in agriculture in Turkey. She is a woman entrepreneur who set out by saying "Not without agricultural development". In 2004, she founded agriculturalmarketing.org. She taught farmers about the internet, provided virtual training and marketed their products. She visited 12 thousand villages one by one. She implemented many new projects for farmers, from modeling special credit cards for farmers from banks to applications created in collaboration with telecommunication companies. These works and projects of Tülin Akın made an impact not only in Turkey but also in the world. She received one award after another. 2 years ago at the World Economic Forum, she received the Schwab Foundation's World's Best Social Entrepreneur Award and the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation's Goalkeepers Award. One of Sabancı Foundation's Changemakers and one of the winners of KAGIDER's competition, Tülin Akın continues to produce exemplary projects without slowing down.

We Must Take Urgent Measures
Last week, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced that urgent measures must be taken to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic, which has engulfed the whole world, including Turkey, from triggering a food crisis. On this occasion, we discussed agriculture in Turkey during the corona days with Tulin Akın, who founded a smart village in Aydın. Akın's first sentence was "In these difficult days, farmers should be supported as much as health workers" and continued as follows:

"If the corona pandemic prevents our agricultural activities, a risk as big as the pandemic awaits us. For now, officials say we have stocks for a short-term pandemic. But agricultural production is cyclical. It is not like any other production. For example, in an automotive or textile company, you can take a break for a while and then easily pick up where you left off, but this is not the case in agriculture. These days, for example, there is a risk of rust disease in wheat. If you say there is an epidemic and do not go to your fields and spray, you may lose your crop. Then you need to take precautions and run to your field quickly. In agriculture, it is not possible to do this fifteen days later if you do not get the seedlings that you need to bring together with the soil. Everything has to be in harmony. Just in time, that is. You cannot say to your cows, 'I am not milking you this week, wait'. In fact, if the farmer cannot produce, of course he loses his income. But he has more opportunities to continue his life than people in the city. Farmers go to their fields thinking that our people should not go hungry and they try not to disrupt production. If agricultural production is disrupted, it will be very difficult to repair the wounds. Agriculture is unlike any other industry; it is very difficult to start and very difficult to stop. That's why we need to take care of our farmers and be more sensitive to their needs than ever before."

Village Governed in Virtual Space

A smart village with a 300-acre application area in the village of Kasaplar in Aydın's Koçarlı District. It is a village where techniques and technologies on field, garden agriculture, greenhouse cultivation, beekeeping and animal husbandry can be managed from a mobile phone. In the Vodafone smart village technology-supported agricultural research farm established by TABİT, measures have been taken against COVID-19 and production continues. Since the village is equipped with new technologies, irrigation is done remotely and fields are monitored. Control is also provided remotely with digital insect traps.

Solution for Seasonal Workers

One of the most important problems in agriculture is the situation of temporary agricultural workers. The housing problems of seasonal workers working in the fields during planting times are not at all suitable for pandemic conditions. Akın makes the following suggestion on this issue: "We need to solve this urgently and create shelters with the necessary health measures. We have made suggestions to the local governments we are in contact with on this issue. In this period of the pandemic, we are trying to meet all kinds of information needs of farmers for production in the most sensitive way."

Transition to a New World Order

Tülin Akın also emphasized the importance of planning for Turkey to become a self-sufficient country in agriculture as in the past, and in this period, she reaches and informs 1.6 million farmers with smart applications in the virtual environment. Akın, who argues that we will move to a new world order with the coronavirus epidemic, speaks as follows: "We will realize how important food and its raw material agriculture are. Also, those who do not realize the importance of our water resources will do so. Knowing that people can endure hunger for 20 days at most and thirst for 6 days at most, we must take measures to meet all kinds of needs of agricultural production and our farmers, the most important element of agricultural production. From now on, the level of development of countries will be determined by whether they are self-sufficient in food. We need to support our farmers as much as possible."