A Contextualized Farm Management Information System

Abstract

Various Information Communication Technology (ICT) Agricultural initiatives implemented in Kenya have largely concentrated on the general farming set ups, ignoring the specific farm and Agricultural activities contexts. Literature review, sampling of ICT for Agriculture initiative (ICT4Agri) reports, and our knowledge on existing Agricultural Management Information Systems (AMISs) showed that a majority of the ICT4Agri for various farm management were general in nature and mostly facilitated information push towards farmers as opposed to allowing for a bidirectional flow of information. Only a few personalized and contextualized MISs for day-to-day management of farms existed. Besides their abundance, adoption, and use, challenges still exist due to the generalized nature in which system designers and developers conceptualize the ICT4Agri artefacts. With the objective of finding out if a more contextualized Agricultural farm Management Information System was better than the generalized Agricultural systems, we carried out an analysis of the current situation and designed, implemented, and tested a new integrated ICT4Agri dairy farm Management Information System. The system was co-designed with five purposefully selected ICT literate dairy farmers from the North rift counties of Kenya. Besides the presentation of the developed artefact, this paper presents the study results which showed that there is still need for compatible ICT agricultural systems which can allow farmers to process their own data by being allowed to have bidirectional movement of data and being able to create and use their own data. As a result, it was noted that there still exists a lot of opportunities for Agricultural digitization, especially if contextualization was to be factored in