The Philippines is an agricultural country, which means that agriculture is the main source of employment and income for many Filipinos. Given the current situation of agriculture of the Philippines where farmers are forced to lower their selling price, they need detailed information regarding different techniques to improve their yield. In today’s modern world, the mobile phone is an essential tool for everyday life, especially in urban communities. The mobile phone makes communication instantaneous as it allows its users to do tasks or transfer information easily through texting, calling or interacting through the internet. With this technology, we hope to improve the lives of farmers.

We put together a smartphone application and coded SMS prompt for feature phones to help educate and inform the farmers and consumers using the data from NASA. The application and SMS prompt provides the predicted daily weather, proposed crop rotation and market price for crops. The direct ordering of crops is available using the smartphone application. Both the application and the SMS prompt will provide real time information, every time the smartphone application is opened and every 4 am for the SMS prompts. The information included are the weather, news, opportunities, and other information can be asked using a toll free SMS number by inputting proper syntax for the feature phone or by clicking “more information” in the smartphone application. Orders can be made through the smartphone application and the farmers around the area will be notified through SMS, prices will have a threshold value that will be determined by the market price.

One of the challenges the team faced is the lack of access to real-time data. The team had difficulty to integrate the data with the map.

Our repository and code for the PWA (buyer side) is completely open-source and can be seen here:
https://github.com/manumac/buy-ani.git

to see the PWA in action click here: tentative working PWA

Resources for Data:

• MapX
• National Color-Coded Agricultural Guide Map from Department of Agriculture
• NASA WorldWind Explorer
• Realtime IMERG Cesium

Research Resources:

Brown, E. O., Ebora, R. V., & Decena, F. L. C. (2019, November 21). Asia-Pacific Information Platform on Agricultural Policy-The Current State, Challenges and Plans for Philippine Agriculture. Retrieved from http://ap.fftc.agnet.org/ap_db.php?id=941.

Cameron, H. M. G. (2006). Trends in Agriculture and Agribusiness. Journal of Business & Finance Librarianship, 12(1), 3–32. doi:10.1300/j109v12n01_02

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (2017). El niño and la niña in the Philippines. Retrieved from http://www.fao.org/3/a-i6775e.pdf [PDF File]

Ruhsam, H., and Hutchins, J., Definition of Agribusiness. Retrieved October 21, 2005 from http://www.ils.unc.edu/∼hutcr/definition.html.