Web and mobile based application

Abstract

Agricultural production in Uganda is mainly dominated by smallholder farmers engaged in food and cash crops, horticulture, fishing and livestock farming. Most farmers in Uganda use rudimentary tools in farming. The Government of Uganda (GoU), through the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries (MAAIF) is aiming at commercializing the agriculture sector by 2020 through agricultural mechanization and modernization at farm level and one of the statuary bodies playing a significant role in implementing this is the National Agriculture Advisory Services (NAADS) [1], [2] . A key intervention area is in increasing farmers’ access to agricultural equipment such as tractors, bulldozers, graders, combine harvesters, forklifts, agro-processing machinery, farm tools, straw choppers, excavators, bowsers, transformers, among other equipment. However, many challenges still hinder agricultural mechanization. These include poor access to information about the availability of the equipment, inadequate complementary infrastructure for using agricultural equipment, delayed initiation of procurement process, inadequacy and inappropriateness of some supplied equipment, absence of some spare parts, high poverty levels to mention but a few. The main objective of the Mytractor System is to gather and analyse requirements, design, develop and implement a system which will provide a platform that effectively and efficiently offers tractor-sharing services to Ugandan farmers. This report describes the steps undertaken to develop the MyTractor system. The system is to be used by farmers, tractor service providers and a system administrator who will manage and maintain the system. Mytractor system helps to overcome challenges of reliable tractor performance, shortage of high quality operators and fraud. The data used to develop the system was gathered interviews with the aid of interviews and questionnaires. We carried out interviews at Engineering Solutions in Bugolobi, Kampala and Cooper Motors Cooperation in Nakawa, Kamapala. We also uploaded our questionnaires (Google Forms) in some farmer groups on Facebook. Microsoft Excel and Google forms was used to analyses the data. Entity Relation Diagrams (ERDs), sequence diagrams, use cases and class diagrams were used in the design of the system. The technologies used for implementing the system include; Digital Ocean Cloud service provider, mongo DB database management system, flutter framework, laravel, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The outcome of the research was the MyTractor system where farmers should be able to request for a tractor service and a tractor service provider should be able to effectively manage these requests so that an appointment can be scheduled. A farmer can give feedback in form of a star-based rating system, comments and suggestion. A weather prediction module has been integrated to enable farmers and service providers to schedule appointments.