I am Syed Shakil Amjid, 31, from Pakistan. I have worked in a range of businesses and development organizations after I finished my degree in animal science in 2006.
My diverse experience includes a whole-farm approach, ranging from a progeny testing project implementation at Buffalo Research Institute, community farms advisory services at Pakistan Dairy Development Company, silage specialist at DuPont Pioneer, administration of a Web Hosting Hub network and compliance management at Haleeb Foods.
We all know that the world’s population is growing at a much faster rate than the food supply. One way could be to improve production through better farm inputs and breeds/varieties of livestock and crops. This is an ongoing process and may require more time before its safe implementation.
My project is based on the development of a smartphone application that works with the Internet of Things to keep the farmer on track regarding production guidelines about his farm.
I have experienced that most of the farmers, be it livestock or crops, don’t follow the agronomic/production procedures on time. If they could somehow keep track of their activities and start doing actions—i.e. watering, fertilizer application, sprays, harvest, etc.—on time, almost all of them will end up in better production per acre, with no extra costs involved.
- After downloading the application, farmers will select their land blocks according to crops grown via a built-in location and maps feature.
- Once added, the land blocks will be saved to the Cloud.
- Farmers will have the option of selecting crops from the list available.
- General agronomic practices will be loaded after selection of crop and start sending push-messages to the farmer for recommended practices.
- Farmers will be able to set alarms and validate the events, i.e. pollination, vegetation stages and maturity, against the predicted ones by the app.
- The app will collect data from different farmers on geographical zone basis and make itself more useful for its users gradually.
- The final crop production will be checked with practices done and with the passage of time, a better system will start evolving.
Hygrometers, and temperature and other sensors will be introduced for better on-ground assessment in the second phase.
Regarding sustainability of the project, businesses (i.e. seed companies, farm input makers, etc.) will be involved to get precise recommendations regarding their products and farmers will have a choice to select the recommendations from the relevant seed/fertilizer company.
The motivation behind this idea is to successfully incorporate advanced technology to the farming system for better and more efficient utilization of existing resources for an extra tonne of food production.
I have been busy in development of mind-maps and flow diagrams for information data and look forward for its development as soon as I have financial resources. Following is the tentative information about utilization of grant.
- Application development USD 3,000
- Graphic designing USD 500
- Website development USD 500
- Advertisement of social media USD 1,000
Blogpost and picture submitted by Syed Shakil Amjid (Pakistan): shakeelamjid[at]gmail.com
The content, structure and grammar are at the discretion of the author only.
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Is is a good project Syed Shakil sb.
I really liked this idea. Our literate farmers can also use this app (illiterate ones can get help from their children). This will help farmers or other users at every step in agriculture which will ultimately boost up their socioeconomic conditions, with uplifting national economy.
Thank You. The motivation behind the idea came from my own father. He wouldn’t remember the optimum time for various agronomic practices and eventually lose significant amount of production. When i started noticing closely, It wasn’t him alone but a whole chunk of village more or less doing the same and losing then potential crop yield.
Once again thank you for appreciating my idea.