Proposal for a Crop Protection Information System for Rural Farmers in Tanzania
Agronomy
; 11(12):2411, 2021.
Article
in English
| ProQuest Central | ID: covidwho-1594327
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.
Agriculture; smallholder, farming; e-agriculture; digital, agriculture; deep, learning; crop, protection; Short, Message, Service, (SMS); Web; Language; Pesticides; Plant, protection; Farming; Quality, control; Information, systems; Short, message, service; Questionnaires; Small, farms; Crops; Crop, diseases; Natural, language; COVID-19; Fertilizers; African, languages; Crop, production; Farmers; Cellular, telephones; Plant, diseases; Internet, access; Pests; Market, prices; Pandemics; Productivity; Rural, areas; Natural, language, processing; Coronaviruses; Harvest; Query, processing; Decisions; Tanzania
Full text:
Available
Collection:
Databases of international organizations
Database:
ProQuest Central
Language:
English
Journal:
Agronomy
Year:
2021
Document Type:
Article
Similar
MEDLINE
...
LILACS
LIS