CloudFarm: Management of Farms and Crops Data on the Cloud

Abstract

Recent technological advances in Cloud Computing technology paved the way for developing and offering advanced services for remote monitoring in many industry areas; including the agricultural sector. In this work, we developed a Cloud-based farm management information system, referred as CloudFarm. CloudFarm offers a variety of services that helps farmers to manage and keep control of their farms and crops, by supporting all the basic agricultural activities according to set of good agricultural practices. CloudFarm is accessible to farmers, as a mobile application running on a smartphone or tablet that connects with a Cloud service for data analysis and orchestration. The "on the go" system means that farmers can manage and capture scheduled or performed activities directly from fields, while using the smartphone application that is synchronized with data stored permanently on the cloud so that farmers can have always access to up-date and real-time information. Furthermore, CloudFarm offers a Web application where farmers can monitor their data and certified advisors can monitor the farmers' agricultural activities and advise the m about their farm status and best planning of farm and crops works.