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A woman is sitting in a coffee house filled with men.
The farmers in the coffee house are listening to her while looking at the computer.
She is telling something and they are listening to her.
She is showing the website on the computer and they are learning.
Her name is Tülin Akýn.
These coffee houses in the villages are her workplace, her future and also the place where she finds the happiness.
Tülin Akýn is a changemaker who established the Agricultural Marketing Platform.
While she was a university student
she founded the agricultural marketing platform as a social initiative.
Today, the platform has reached approximately one million farmers all across Turkey.
On the Agricultural Marketing Platform, Tülin Akýn shares agricultural
contents that will ease the life of farmers and sends these contents
to the farmers through information technologies.
With their mobile phones, the farmers can also sign up to the Farmers' Club system which is free of charge.
And after becoming members of this club, the farmers receive daily SMS
about various topics such as daily weather forecast, warnings for flood
or rain, wholesale market prices of the products or agricultural support services from the Ministry.
The farmers try to learn the wholesale market prices of the products they produce.
They have to call the market or sometimes they simply can't learn.
A salesperson comes to the village and determines the price.
Sometimes due to the frost, rain or flood, the farmers face big amounts of yield loss.
On our platform, we send informative messages to the farmers in each city
and town regarding the products they have.
We remind them of the time of trimming or we inform them about the weather
and warn them to take precautions.
The Agricultural Marketing Platform doesn't just provide the farmers with the free SMS service.
The farmers can also put an advertisement on the website
(tarimsalpazarlama.com) to sell their products or animals.
With this free service, the farmers can sell their products not only
to customers coming to the village but also to customers all over Turkey.
For example we have a farmer in Aksaray, a city in Central Anatolia.
He first put an advertisement on the website.
When he received a lot of demand from customers, he started to sell his neighbors' products on the website as well.
Then, the whole village started to export their products
through agricultural marketing.
We have another farmer in Polatlý, Ankara.
He also sells his sheep on the website.
we can learn the prices, weather forecast or the news from the stock market while sitting at home and connecting to the internet.
But we can also get this service via our mobile phones when we do not have access to the internet.
For example, when we learn that there is going to be heavy rain the next day,
we postpone the spraying. That helps us save the pesticides and our time.
Believing that information should be accessible for everybody, Tülin Akýn
established the Agricultural Marketing Platform and by visiting each and every village,
she persuaded 1 million farmers out of 3 million 150 thousand, who are listed
in the farmer register system of the Ministry of Agriculture, to be members of the platform.
By bringing them together with technology and information,
she made a big difference in the lives of the farmers.