Abstract
Crop protection information, such as how to control emergent and outbreak crop diseases and pests, as well as the latest research, regulations, and quality control measures for pesticides and fertilizers, is important to farmers. Rural smallholder farmers in Tanzania have traditionally relied on government agricultural officers who visit them in their villages to provide this crop protection information. However, these officers are few and cannot reach all the farmers on time. This means that farmers fail to make critical farming decisions on time, which can lead to low crop productivity. In this study, we aim to provide farmers with reliable and instant crop protection information by developing a system based on the Short Message Service (SMS) and the Web. This system automatically replies to farmers’ requests for the latest crop protection information in the Swahili language through SMS on a mobile phone or a Web system. The findings reveal that our proposed system can provide farmers with crop protection information at lower cost (500 times cheaper) than the existing Tigo Kilimo system. Furthermore, our proposed system’s deep learning model is effective in understanding and processing Swahili natural language SMS queries for crop protection information with an accuracy of 96.43%. This crop protection information will help farmers make better critical farming decisions on time and improve crop productivity.
Highlights
In Tanzania, approximately 75% of the labor force is employed in the agriculture sector [1]
After finishing collecting data in Tanzania, the collected sample natural language queries were analyzed by using deep learning model while other data such as farmers’ preferred way of requesting crop protection information via Short Message Service (SMS) were analyzed by using descriptive statistics tools such as cross-tabulation
Because we could not travel to Tanzania and deliver the system to farmers, we relied on secondary data to evaluate the cost of using our system
Summary
In Tanzania, approximately 75% of the labor force is employed in the agriculture sector [1]. Most Tanzanians in the agriculture sector are smallholder farmers (farmers who own and cultivate pieces of land between 2 and 10 hectares in size) living in rural areas and who depend on crop farming as their primary economic activity [2,3] Most of these rural farmers have access to basic farming knowledge, such as how and when to prepare farms, plant crops, treat common crop diseases, use fertilizers, and harvest and store their crops, which is useful in their farming activities [4], access to crop protection information, such as how to control emergent and outbreak crop diseases, weeds, and pests, has remained a challenge to them.
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