Development of a frugal crop planning decision support system for subsistence farmers

Abstract

This dissertation reports on the original study that undertakes the development of a frugal information system to support subsistence farmers through the use of the Agricultural Production Systems Simulator (APSIM) as a support tool to assist them in optimal strategic decisions making. The field of agriculture is vast and in-depth and a number of critical factors like soil type, rainfall and temperature are involved that farmers have to take into account. Farmers persistently face the challenges of increasing and sustaining yields to meet with the populaces demand with often limited resources, which makes strategic decisions on what to plant, when to plant, where to plant and how to plant in a particular season imperative. The way in which this study attempts to solve this agricultural decision making problem is with the use of the APSIM. This technology platform provides an advanced simulation of agricultural systems that can enable subsistence farmers to simulate a number of variables ranging from plant types, soil, climate and even management interactions. This research presents a frugal web-based crop planning decision support system that subsistence farmers can take advantage with the use of the APSIM. The APSIM platform was used to run simulations for various regions with the results containing the expected level of success along with other useful information for a specified crop in the vicinity, using state of the art software platforms and tools ranging from Google Maps application programming interfaces, Microsoft’s model view controller framework, JavaScript and others. The validity of this system was tested through a number of design science methods including structural testing and illustrative scenarios, show capability of the information system. The results obtained from this evaluation show a small but powerful tool that has the capability of servicing a multitude of farmers with crop management decisions.