Development of a mobile computing framework to aid decision-making on organic fertilizer management using a crop growth model

Abstract

Interest in organic farming has increased to minimize the environmental issues associated with intensive crop production. However, the support for decision-making on organic fertilizer management has been limited, which would become a barrier for wide adoption of organic farming. Here we propose a software development framework to facilitate the development of a decision support system based on a mobile computing platform. In the present study, the Organic-fertilizer Application Support Information System (OASIS), which is compatible with the Android operating system, was implemented to perform the hindcast simulation of crop growth under organic management practices. The performance of OASIS was tested using 16 different smartphones. It was found that OASIS took a relatively short time, e.g., < five seconds, to simulate crop growth even using an outdated smartphone, although it took within about one minute to download the weather data. In a case study, the observation data from field experiments were applied to OASIS. Our results indicated that the hindcasts had relatively small differences in heading dates and yield, which were a maximum of one day and 10%, respectively. These results suggest that OASIS would support reasonable decision-making on organic fertilizer management practices. Our framework would guide the implementation of mobile applications to support decision-making on specific crop management practices.