Enhancing Agricultural Sustainability through Crowdsensing: A Smart Computing Approach

Abstract

Every country needs an efficient food production and distribution system to provide food security for the citizens and to achieve economic growth. Agriculture forms a significant part of a country’s food production effort. Many factors affect agriculture production from preharvest to post-harvest periods. This includes factors such as overproduction, underproduction, pest and disease attacks, and market price fluctuations. A deeper analysis of these problems revealed that the root cause was farmers and other stakeholders in the agriculture domain not receiving the right information at the right time when they need it most. They need both published information such as crop varieties, fertilizers, suitable soil types and real-time dynamic information such as current crop production levels, market prices, and pest and disease outbreaks. Smart Computing offers an innovative way to generate situational information by providing published knowledge as actionable information and making users act on this information. In here, we extend our previous work to provide timely actionable information via crop calendar feature by re-conceptualizing based on information flow in Global Positioning Systems (GPS). Also, we adopted empowerment theory to create empowerment-oriented farming processes to motivate farmers to produce crowdsensed information and aggregated it to generate new situational knowledge on pest and disease outbreaks. This created a holistic information flow model for agriculture domain like energy flow in biological ecosystems enabling us to create a Digital Knowledge Ecosystem for Agribusiness. This system is now being trialed in Sri Lanka and India among thousands of farmers.