A Soil-Crop Analysis System (SCAS)

Abstract

The use of technology in the agricultural sector is becoming more important as the demand for computer-based agricultural systems heightens world wide. Identifying directions for development of future ICT for the agricultural sector depends on understanding the context in which solutions are to be deployed. This report gives details on several activities carried out as part of a case study, focused on the agricultural sector and drawing upon the existing local area network capability as well as interaction with agricultural professionals. Existing in-house system from different application domains were investigated for their relevance to the agricultural sector and it was realized that the soil analysis process and the storage of soil data results was manually done and slowly conducted and it further contributed to the loss of valuable soil data results, it also contributed to wrong recommendation of crops and fertilizers to farmers and therefore ; scenarios were simulated for future ICT use in the agricultural sector, based on existing literature on ICT application deployment in agricultural sector, a need to come up with an efficient, accurate system to solve the slow soil analysis process and improve on data storage of soil test results and recommendations given to farmers was made. This was achieved through designing the system which would do this. Success was registered because the system designed was able to achieve the intended objectives of the study. Interviews and visits were carried at the faculty of agriculture to obtain their insights into ICT application in the agricultural sector. These methods gave an understanding into how to carry out future development of ICT solutions for agricultural sector. The system was designed by using DFDs and ERDs and using programming languages (PHP, HTML and MYSQL).