Abstract:
Farmers in Sri Lanka often face problems in crop production, and it severely affects them and the agriculture sector of Sri Lanka. Research has revealed that farmer and other stakeholders in the agriculture domain lack access to real-time situational information such as market prices and current production details to make optimal decisions in the farming life cycle, especially during the production planning stage. The farmer is the most critical stakeholder in the domain; lack of effort was seen in providing farmers with the essential information on a real-time basis. This has become the kickoff to many difficulties faced by farmers. Out of many difficulties, price fluctuations at the farm gates due to overproduction and underproduction of crops stand out in Sri Lanka. Over many years, markets are oversupplied with vegetables leading to lower thus resulting in lower income to farmers. Farmers often struggle to sell their harvest and fall into debt as they fail to recover the cost of production due to unreasonable prices. Mobile usage among farmers seems to grow rapidly nowadays. The project AgriAid aims to analyze and identify an IT-based solution based on Social Life Networks, focusing farmers on overcoming the information gap and building a planned and enduring agriculture production in Sri Lanka. The proposed solution intends to solve the problem by using this situational information to help in production planning for farmers which will increase food security while minimizing waste.
