  Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be a valuable decision-support tool for
farmers. This motivated our deployment of a WSN system to support rain-fed
agriculture in India. We defined promising use cases and resolved technical
challenges throughout a two-year deployment of our COMMON-Sense Net system,
which provided farmers with environment data. However, the direct use of this
technology in the field did not foster the expected participation of the
population. This made it difficult to develop the intended decision-support
system. Based on this experience, we take the following position in this paper:
currently, the deployment of WSN technology in developing regions is more
likely to be effective if it targets scientists and technical personnel as
users, rather than the farmers themselves. We base this claim on the lessons
learned from the COMMON-Sense system deployment and the results of an extensive
user experiment with agriculture scientists, which we describe in this paper.
