A Mobile Application For Providing Agricultural Information

Abstract

Abstract This project aimed at developing a mobile application for providing agricultural information to farmers who face a number of challenges such as pests and diseases for their crops, use of poor farming methods and lack of market for their products, resulting to uncertain incomes due to lack of enough information on how to overcome the above challenges. The existing information management system has enabled the community to know the different pests and diseases, costs of the various goods in the market places, what MAFPAI does is extending a somewhat similar service to the rural farmers by linking farmers to the buyers for their products that they wish to sell and providing relevant information that will guide farmers on how to plant crops and at the same time contacting the agronomists for further assistance in case of need. The MAFPAI can be used by farmers, buyers and agronomists. In case the application does not contain enough information or different procedures on how to cure some pests and diseases, the farmer takes photo of the affected area and sends it to the agronomist who responds back within the application. Farmers upload the crop information upon harvest and the buyer views the available crops for sale and is able to make an order of the choices putting the necessary information. The buyer can still comment on the crops. Improvements and enhancements to the existing systems were achieved through studying them, making interviews, questionnaires, and carrying out observations to determine requirements for the system. The designing of the system was achieved through both process modeling which includes DFD’s, decision tables, architectural diagrams and data modeling which includes defining entities and their attributes, identifying relationships and entity relationship diagrams. System implementation was done using implementation tools that included; android studio, PHP, MySQL, Java. Some of the achievements included quick insertion of data, system and information security, viewing one’s information and quick searching of information.