A Key Model to Provide Required Information at Farming Life Cycle of Crop Production Through A Real-Time Mobile-Based Application

Abstract

Agriculture plays an essential role in the developing countries and is the backbone of the Sri Lankan financial system with a large number of small holdings and rural farmers (Chhachhar and Hassan, 2013; Potts, 2016). Farmers face many difficulties relating to low production, marketing, and agribusiness (Henegedara. G.M, 2015). In the digitally connected era, people are given their maximum effort to address the challenges. But the current Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from agriculture in Sri Lanka (7.4%) indicates a diminishing value (DCS, 2019) due to the designed ICT platforms which focused on a limited area of crop production instead of the whole process. Therefore, farmers require context-specific, complete and actionable information to make timely-quality decisions (Ginige et al., 2016). Identification of the factors/parameters/conditions that influence the whole farming lifecycle of crop production is vital for farmers in order to take crucial steps. Hence, mobile phones play an important role in solving collective action problems. Further, speeding up the information which is conveyed to the farmers help them to take decisions much more easily (Cieslik et al., 2018; Nyamba and Mlozi, 2012). This research contributes to identify the factors that impact on the different farming lifecycle stages of crop production and to develop a model that can be effectively addressed through the Govi-Nena mobile-based application (www.govinena.lk).