Abstract
We have developed a system facilitated by a mobile artefact to effectively identify crop disorder incidents and manage them using recommended control measures. This work overcomes the limitations of the existing attempts by using digital technology to empower farmers to identify crop disorders rather than replace them with automated techniques. Our approach empowers farmers by providing the information in context for them to identify crop disorders. The developed solution can identify most of the crop disorders instantaneously, irrespective of the crop or other factors that make crop disorder identification complicated. For the rest, it provides a mechanism to carry out a manual identification with the help of subject experts. The solution was deployed among paddy farmers in Sri Lanka to understand how well this could assist them in identifying and managing crop disorders. The system was able to identify 70.8% of the crop disorder incidents reported by the farmers and provided them with the relevant control measures. Farmers’ perceptions of various usability aspects of the solution revealed that the application of agrochemicals and expenses associated with agrochemicals were significantly reduced. It was also observed that the yield quality and quantity and overall revenue have increased compared to the previous seasons.
Highlights
The agricultural sector has always been an influential economic force in Sri Lanka, making notable contributions to the nation’s economy, food security, and workforce [1].According to World Bank, 23.7% of the total workforce in Sri Lanka was employed in the agricultural sector in 2020 [2]
In recent times, there has been a substantial reduction in the contribution of agricultural production to Sri Lanka’s national gross domestic product (GDP), which accounted for 20% of GDP in 2000 and declined to 7.4% in 2019 [2,3]
This paper presents a process enabled by a mobile artefact to effectively identify crop disorder incidents and support farmers to manage them using recommended control measures on time
Summary
The agricultural sector has always been an influential economic force in Sri Lanka, making notable contributions to the nation’s economy, food security, and workforce [1].According to World Bank, 23.7% of the total workforce in Sri Lanka was employed in the agricultural sector in 2020 [2]. In recent times, there has been a substantial reduction in the contribution of agricultural production to Sri Lanka’s national GDP, which accounted for 20% of GDP in 2000 and declined to 7.4% in 2019 [2,3]. Overall, such negative outcomes have resulted due to many reasons. The present crop disorder management process that is practised by farmers in Sri. Lanka consists of three stages: monitoring the field for the presence of any abnormal symptoms, identifying crop disorders if symptoms are present, and employing suitable control measures [19]. The sources used by farmers to aid their decision-making process can be grouped into reliable and unreliable sources
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