A mobile app to identify ginger pests and diseases and to link farmers to buyers
Abstract
In 2016, the Fact Fish Ginger (FFG) carried out a survey on Ginger plant farmers in Uganda and found out that these farmers are still using tradition methods and agronomists at district level to aid them to identify pests and diseases in Ginger plants, and using middle men to link them to potential buyers of their produce. However no advanced technology of using a mobile app has been developed to aid Ginger plant farmers to identify pests and diseases in a Ginger plant and to link farmers to potential customers. This project was aimed at aiding farmers to identify pests and diseases in a Ginger plant, and linking them to potential customers to sell their commodities through using a mobile app approach. The Ginger mobile app was developed based on the data like Ginger plant data, pests and diseases data, and market data which was collected and analyzed, and used to design a data base management system, user interfaces using Android studio 4.5 - a programming language software. The data base was segmented into three sections: (i) the firebase real-time data base which stores the customer and the farmer identifications, pest and disease data, the ginger plant data, (ii) the firebase storage which stores the media files like images, and (iii) the fire base authentication which stores the email addresses and the password for users. The app was tested in Katosi which is found in Mukono district on 30 farmers and 40 buyers with phones of android 4.2 to 10 versions and Ram of 540mbs to 3 GB. The app was tested based on its performance and user friendliness. Based on performance, 25 farmers (83%) rated the app very good, 4 farmers (13%) rated the app good and one farmer (4%) rated the app not good. Based on the user friendliness of the app, 25 farmers (90%) rated the app very good, 5 farmers (10%) rated the app good and none of the farmers rated the app that not user friendly. Also 35 out of 40 buyers (87%) rated the app very good, 4 out of 40 buyers (10%) rated the app good and 1 out of 40 buyers (3%) rated the app not good. Basing on the user friendliness of the app, 35 out of 40 buyers (87%) rated the app very good, 5 out of 40 buyers (13%) rated the app good and none of the buyers rated the app not user friendly. Therefore with these statistics, the app is recommended to be used by both farmers and ginger buyers.