Abstract:
Sri Lanka is an agricultural country and agriculture highly depends on weather
conditions, considerable use of family labour, and infrastructure facilities such as
irrigation, transport and electricity facilities in remote areas. Several difficulties are
experienced by small- and large-scale farmers in Sri Lanka in selling their harvest
including not getting the price for their harvest as they expected, difficulties in identifying
good buyers from the larger buyer community and excess production during the particular
times of the year. Although several mobile-based and web-based applications have
already been introduced to Sri Lankan agriculture community, it’s difficult to find an
advanced and efficient application to deal with the problems in the agricultural value
chain like inefficient distribution of products, excess supply, and middlemen
involvement. The main objective of this research was to develop web and mobile-based
systems that facilitate farmers, buyers, and transporters to deal with above problems.
Initially, the information required to create the mobile and web applications were
gathered from the farmers and Agricultural Instructors of Matara and Hambanthota area.
Collected data were analysed to develop different User Interfaces and systems to facilitate
important functions such as advertising of farm produces, request orders from buyers and
transporters, request items and making payment of advance by the buyers upon farmer’s
approval, and notifying the transporters to pick up the package. The Android Profiler and
several test cases were used to test the performance of mobile and web applications.
Then, both web and mobile applications were evaluated with different users and obtained
more than 90% positive feedbacks. According to their comments and feedback, the
system was refined.
Keywords: Agricultural products, Efficient distribution, Mobile and web-based solutions
