Farmers Weekly journalist wins Nuffield Scholarship to study the agricultural web

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Caroline Stocks, deputy news editor of RBI's Farmers Weekly Magazine, will spend around six weeks studying farmers' internet and mobile use after winning a £5,000 Nuffield Scholarship .

Stocks, who will travel to Washington in March to meet the other Nuffield scholars, plans to also visit India, Australia and the Netherlands, during the course of her trip.

The travel will take place over the next 18 months, after which she will produced a full report for the Nuffield Trust.

In Mumbai, she plans to look at how farmers use text messages for trading and sharing information. Few farmers have computers, she said. "A lot of communication and trading is done with mobile phones, which you wouldn’t necessarily expect."

In the Netherlands she will visit the Farmers Weekly sister paper to witness their operation. The Dutch have better broadband coverage, she said. "I want to see if the way they use the internet is different because all their farmers are better connected than ours are."

In the United States, she hopes to take a trip to Silicon Valley and visit Apple headquarters, where will look at  "the way this modern technology is relevant to their [farmers'] lives".

Stocks plans to blog about her trip and the study, and hopes to slot normal work in alongside: "I've picked a study I think will be relevant to the magazine as well. A lot of farmers I've arranged to go and see, I think I'll be able to write features on. I think it will be really good for my career."

Farmers Weekly has seen much success with its online community building initiatives . In 2008, Julian Gairdner, online editor of Farmers Weekly , told AOP seminar delegates how online agricultural dating , new blogs and tractor video clips have redefined the title's online presence and scooped it the AOP B2B online community award 2008.